Team:Uppsala/Entrepreneurship

<!DOCTYPE html> Human Practices

MARKET ANALYSIS

So we wanted to produce crocin, but then what? Before going through with our project we wanted to make sure that we were actually doing something of worth, so we started off by doing a market analysis to confirm that there exists a market for crocin.

With the market analysis we concluded that the compounds in the crocin pathway are very expensive, since today the only way to get them are to extract them from saffron. Saffron itself is harvested in a very labour-intensive process and Iran holds 95 % of the saffron production. This means that being able to produce the compounds synthetically could reduce the costs drastically. It’s hard to calculate exactly by how much the cost could be reduced since crocin is still very unexplored, but when comparing our project to a study done on cellulase enzymes we can estimate that a reduction of the price by 30% is possible and furthermore a reduction of 85% is possible on the industrial scale. These numbers definitely incouraged us to go ahead with the project. You can read the entire market analysis here.