Journal

Across every observed price, what a shopper can actually pay spans 2-fold while sellers quote across 8.3. Farm-direct covers almost the whole range by itself, because pack size decides the price and the channel does not.

Seed alone makes home growing look eleven times cheaper. Add medium, power, a failure rate and your own time at $20 an hour and the saving against the cheapest retail is 8 percent.

A warm fridge costs days: arugula, radish and red cabbage lost a week of quality at 10C against 4C, and one mustard study lost ten. And no visible sign has ever been validated as a safety test.

The nitrate figures circulating for microgreens are dry weight, and the legal limits are fresh weight. Convert the same published result and it lands anywhere from 1,045 to 11,307 mg/kg depending on the crop. Three species have been assayed for metals.

No regulator anywhere sets a daily microgreen intake. The only weighed serving published is 2.5 grams; the only daily-feeding trials used 28 to 30. Nobody has reconciled those two numbers.

Nobody has measured how much juice a microgreen tray gives. The one published figure is a seller's, for wheatgrass, on a tray 23 percent larger than a 1020. Rescaled, a 240 mL glass is three quarters of a tray.

Priced per unit of growing area, the ranking inverts: the $60 kit is the cheapest and the $20 kit is nearly the dearest. Against assembling it yourself, the sample runs 6 to 40 times.

Sellers claim 80, 85, 95 percent or negligible loss. In the one broccoli study, retention ran from 4.42 percent for chlorophyll to 97.86 for potassium, a 22-fold spread. One number cannot describe that.

Sesame, mustard, buckwheat and celery are all grown as microgreens and all carry allergen labeling law somewhere. And not one published case report names a cut microgreen as the food eaten.