Natural saffron is grown in one region, harvested in one fortnight and priced like a commodity that could vanish. Sunward grows it in controlled rooms on a schedule, grades every lot to ISO 3632, and releases it with the paperwork a procurement team actually needs.
Demand for clean-label colour and flavour keeps growing. Supply is concentrated, seasonal, and routinely adulterated. For buyers, the question is no longer price — it is whether the same grade will be there next year.
~90%
of the world’s saffron comes from a single country
One climate, one harvest window, one set of political and logistical risks.
2 weeks
is the entire field harvest season
Every kilogram of annual supply is picked and dried in a fortnight.
I to III
ISO 3632 categories are all sold under the one word “saffron”
Grade is rarely stated on invoices; adulteration and mis-grading are common.
Four parts, each designed so that a buyer can check our claims rather than trust them.
Fourteen rooms with independent climate control. Corms flower on our schedule, in three staggered cycles, so the harvest window is months, not weeks.
Each batch is dried on a recorded profile. Temperature, humidity and time are logged against the batch and stay with the lot for its life.
Colouring strength, moisture and foreign matter are measured per batch — in-house and by an accredited laboratory — before a lot is released.
Growing in Alentejo, grading in Lisbon, commercial in Rotterdam. Samples ship inside the EU in days, and every conversation has a grading file behind it.
The infrastructure is built and producing. What comes next is scale.
14
Expanded from six rooms in 2025, on a site with a ten-year lease.
100%
Allocated before release to flavour houses and manufacturers.
2 labs
Our own spectrophotometry, cross-checked by an ISO 17025-accredited laboratory.
5×
Demand already exceeds output; expansion is funded for the next build-out.
The Alentejo site is where the model runs: the rooms, the drying hall, the team that walks the benches every morning. It is not a pilot. It is the first of several hubs, and the place where every number on this page was measured.
Visit the farm page
Harvest note,
Lot SW-26-07 is the first saffron we have released with a complete grading file: ISO 3632 colouring strength, moisture, and a sealed retention sample for every carton.
Read more
Announcement,
Samples, documentation and allocation conversations now run from the Netherlands, closer to the flavour houses and food manufacturers that buy most of our output.
Read more
Ingredient Supply Review,
A long-form interview with our founders on the economics of growing the world's most expensive spice indoors — and why consistency, not yield, is the number that matters.
Read on Ingredient Supply Review
Tell us what you need — grade, volume, timing — and we will come back with a sample plan.