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Saffron (Crocus sativus L.): gold of the spices—a comprehensive review

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Abstract

Saffron (Crocus sativus L.) is a monocotyledonous herbaceous triploid plant that produces the most expensive spice in the world. Its main constituents, crocin, picrocrocin, and safranal, are responsible for color, taste, and aroma, respectively. The saffron plant produces a red-colored spice that is important in pharmaceutics, cosmetics, perfumery, and textile dye-producing industries. Iran produces almost 90% of the total world production. The saffron market is expected to grow by 12.09% in the forecast period 2020 to 2027. This paper reviews the current knowledge about the taxonomy, geographical distribution, reproductive biology, chemical composition, therapeutic and traditional uses, and agro-technology of the world’s most expensive spice crop, saffron.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the Director, CSIR-IHBT, Palampur, for providing the necessary facilities during this study. The authors are thankful to Er Amit Kumar, Senior Principal Scientist, CSIR-IHBT for plotting the figure of saffron introduction. Financial assistance received under the project “Introduction of high value spice saffron (Crocus sativus L.) in un-explored areas (MLP 0127)” from the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, New Delhi is acknowledged. This is CSIR-IHBT Manuscript Number 4666.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research (AcSIR), Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, India

    Deepak Kothari & Rakesh Kumar

  2. Agrotechnology Division, CSIR-Institute of Himalayan Bioresource Technology, (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research), Post-Box No. 6, Palampur, HP, 176 061, India

    Deepak Kothari, Rajesh Thakur & Rakesh Kumar

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  1. Deepak Kothari
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Overall planning, guidance, paper editing was done by Dr. Rakesh Kumar. Deepak Kothari and Rajesh Thakur searched the literature and prepared the manuscript.

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Kothari, D., Thakur, R. & Kumar, R. Saffron (Crocus sativus L.): gold of the spices—a comprehensive review. Hortic. Environ. Biotechnol. 62, 661–677 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13580-021-00349-8

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