Saffron is priced per gram, which sounds precise and hides almost everything. The same nominal gram can be four different products at four different prices, and the cheapest one is usually cheap for a reason you would not accept if it were stated plainly.

Rather than quote figures that will be wrong within a season, this piece explains what moves the number, so you can judge a price in front of you.

Why it costs what it costs

The arithmetic is unusual. A crocus flower produces three stigmas. A gram of dried saffron takes roughly one hundred and fifty flowers. A kilogram takes somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000.

Every one of those flowers is picked by hand, in a window of about three weeks, in the cold hours before the sun is properly up. The stigmas are then separated by hand, in the same day, because the material degrades quickly once the flower is off the plant.

There is no mechanisation anywhere in that chain, and no prospect of any. Saffron is expensive for the simple and permanent reason that it is almost entirely labour.

What moves the price between two honest sellers

Grade. Mongra, being stigma alone, costs considerably more per gram than Lachha, which carries pale style. This is the single largest legitimate factor, and it is a difference in what you are getting rather than in margin.

Origin. Kashmiri saffron commands a premium over Iranian and Spanish material. Some of that premium is genuine — the karewa soil and the short, cold autumn produce a distinctive aroma profile — and some of it is reputation. Iran produces the overwhelming majority of the world supply and a good deal of it is excellent.

Harvest year. Saffron does not spoil quickly but it fades. Colour and aroma both decline over a couple of years. Current-season material is worth more and ought to be labelled as such.

Documentation. A lot with a laboratory report behind it costs more than one without, because testing costs money and because the seller is accepting accountability for a specific number.

The prices that should worry you

The useful signal is not the absolute figure but the distance from what everything else costs.

If a gram is priced at a fraction of the prevailing market rate, arithmetic rather than suspicion should settle it. Nobody picks 150 flowers by hand, separates them by hand the same day, packs, ships and still undercuts the field by half. Something in the jar is not saffron, or is not the grade claimed, or is not the year claimed.

The most common form this takes is not outright fake saffron. It is Lachha sold at a Mongra price, or three-year-old material sold as current season — both of which are real saffron, and both of which mean you paid roughly twice what you got.

Buying sensibly

Buy the smallest quantity you will actually use within a year. Saffron fades, and a large jar bought cheaply that spends two years in a cupboard is worse value than a small jar of current-season material.

Buy by weight from a seller who states the weight, not by "a pinch" or an unspecified tin. Ask for the harvest year and the grade as separate questions, because a seller who is vague about one is often vague about both.

And treat a laboratory report as the price justification it is. A seller charging a premium and producing a crocin figure to explain it is doing something quite different from a seller charging a premium and producing adjectives.