PINC, the venture arm of international food company Paulig, has led a US$2.9 million (€2.73 million) investment round in Swedish AgriTech company BlueRedGold, with participation from The Food Tech Lab and PolarVentures. The funding accelerates the development of the world’s first scalable indoor saffron cultivation system, powered by robotics and artificial intelligence.

The investment aligns with Paulig’s sustainability and flavor expertise strategies, reinforcing its commitment to shaping the future of food through resilient supply models.

“We will deploy the funds to scale our indoor production capacity, expanding into a larger facility, investing in equipment needed, and recruiting additional team members, to meet growing customer demand and substantially increase saffron output,” Nastaran Baleng–Soultani, CEO BlueRedGold, tells Food Ingredients First.

She says manual harvests of saffron require vast numbers of pickers, roughly 150 000 flowers per kg, making the process slow, costly and highly seasonal. “Our AI-guided robots automate the harvest year-round, dramatically reducing labor dependency, lowering unit costs and creating a steadier, more robust supply chain that can scale reliably.”

Erika Hombert, senior investment manager at PINC, agrees: “Saffron is one of the most culturally significant and economically valuable spices on the planet, but its production is fragile, inconsistent, and facing growing sustainability challenges.”

“BlueRedGold’s approach brings automation, predictability, and quality to a supply chain we know well — offering a complimentary path forward for future production.”

Tapping AI and robotics

BlueRedGold’s system replicates ideal saffron growing conditions indoors, enabling multiple annual harvests and automating labor-intensive processes like flower picking and stigma separation.

Baleng–Soultani tells us the company’s saffron production methods will involve AI and robotics in “every critical step, most notably the labor-intensive harvesting phase.” This will allow the team to operate continuously, optimize the picking and “maintain strict quality control throughout the year.”

For Hombert, the saffron cultivation system “isn’t just a pilot — it’s a blueprint we can multiply globally”. 

“Demand is already there, not just from food producers, but from the growing medical and nutraceutical markets.”

BlueRedGold’s immediate focus remains saffron, but the underlying methods and processes could “most probably be applicable to other crops in the future,” shares Baleng–Soultani.

“Our priority is to ramp up production and fulfill existing LOIs, delivering consistent, pesticide-free saffron to clients in the nutraceutical, food and cosmetics sectors, and to refine our processes as we prepare for broader market rollout,” she concludes.