Most Profitable Microgreens: Break-Even by Crop and Channel

At $3.75 an ounce, sunflower is the most profitable microgreen in this site's comparison of 38 crops, followed by komatsuna, broccoli, pak choi, kale, kohlrabi, radish and mizuna when you rank them by net per tray-day. The crop is only half the answer, though. Against the University of Missouri Extension's midpoint cost of $32.99 a tray, 11 of those 38 crops break even at a $3.75 food-service price, 6 break even at a $3.00 restaurant price, 1 breaks even at a $1.88 direct pack price, and none break even at what grocery stores pay growers. Where you sell moves the answer as much as what you grow.

How the comparison was built

If you have seen a post promising $2,000 a month from a corner of your room, the quickest way to test it is with a tray, a cost and a price you can check. That is all this comparison does, and each of the three pieces comes from a named source.

Cost comes first. The one published per-tray budget is the University of Missouri Extension's March 2024 guide, which costs out a harvested 1020 tray grown in a greenhouse under artificial light. Seed runs from $0.38 for pea to $4.00 for cabbage. Soilless medium is $3.00, fertilizer $0.07, electricity $0.83 to $1.20, and labor $5.00, based on a 15 minute assumption. Labels come to $4.80 to $9.00, packages $3.36 to $6.30 and marketing $4.80 to $9.00, with repairs, interest, depreciation and overhead on top. Across the five crops it budgets, the total runs from $25.42 to $40.55 a tray, and the midpoint of $32.99 is the cost used throughout this page. It describes one growing system in one state, so use it until you have your own costs written down, then swap yours in.

Yield and grow time come from this site's variety specs, where each crop's yield, days to harvest and seed cost carries its own source. Of 62 specs, 38 have all three figures. The other 24 are missing at least one, and they are left out rather than filled in with a guess. Days are the mean of each crop's published range.

Price is held flat so the crops compare on equal footing. Every crop's revenue is figured at $3.75 an ounce, the lowest tier on MicroFreshly's food-service wholesale list, and net is that revenue minus $32.99. A sunflower tray yielding 18.77 ounces brings in $70.39 and nets $37.40. A red cabbage tray at 8.50 ounces nets -$1.12, which is a small loss on every harvest.

Which crops clear break-even at $3.75 an ounce

Break-even yield is the weight a tray has to produce before its sale covers its cost. At $3.75 an ounce and Missouri's midpoint cost, that is 8.80 ounces. Against the cheapest tray in the Missouri budget it drops to 6.78 ounces, and against the most expensive it rises to 10.81.

Eleven of the 38 crops reach 8.80 ounces: sunflower at 18.77, komatsuna at 12.00, broccoli at 11.50, kale, kohlrabi and pak choi at 11.00 each, arugula and mizuna at 10.00 each, radish at 9.75, and mustard and Swiss chard at 9.50 each. If your costs sit near Missouri's cheapest tray, 20 crops clear break-even. If they sit near the most expensive, 6 do.

The bottom of the table is a yield problem that this price cannot cover. Fennel yields 1.00 ounce, onion 1.29 and carrot 2.00, and at $3.75 each of them loses between $25.49 and $29.24 a tray. Parsley, dill, chervil and clover sit between 4.00 and 6.25 ounces and lose money at this price too.

Keep a kitchen scale beside the trays. Most of the yields in this comparison are one farm's target, and your own harvested weight is the figure that decides whether kale clears 8.80 ounces on your shelf. Weigh each tray at harvest, write the number down, and run the same sum with it.

Why the selling channel moves the answer as much as the crop

The same tray of kale is worth very different amounts depending on who buys it, and the break-even yield moves with the price. The table below holds Missouri's $32.99 midpoint cost steady and changes only the price per ounce.

Each price is one seller's or one report's figure, not a market average, so read the rows as examples of what buyers in that channel have paid.

The food-service row is MicroFreshly's list for 4 ounce packs, accessed in August 2026. Its Tier A crops are sunflower, pea shoots, broccoli, radish, red kale, red cabbage, kohlrabi, wasabi mustard and mizuna. The same list takes 20 percent off for chef accounts and 33 percent off for distributor accounts, which brings the $3.75 tier down to $3.00 and $2.51. A discount on the list price raises the yield you need, in the same way the lower rows do.

Restaurant prices land close to that chef-account figure. Piedmont Microgreens charges $3.00 an ounce for common crops, and Foodomarket in New York lists $3.12. At $3.00 a tray needs 11.00 ounces, and six crops make it: sunflower, komatsuna, broccoli, kale, kohlrabi and pak choi. Kale, kohlrabi and pak choi sit exactly on the line at 11.00 ounces, so a lighter harvest than the published figure puts them under. If you plan to sell to chefs, those three are the crops to weigh most carefully.

Direct sales depend heavily on pack size. Two Acre Greens charges $3.00 an ounce for a 1 ounce pack, falling to $1.88 an ounce for a 1 pound pack. At the 1 pound price, sunflower is the only crop in the comparison that breaks even. At the 1 ounce price, the break-even is the same 11.00 ounces as the restaurant row. Another seller, Perro DFW, prices $6 packs of 100 grams and 60 grams, which works out to $1.70 to $2.83 an ounce, as covered in this site's guide to buying microgreens.

Grocery pays growers the least. A Metro Atlanta grower reported a Whole Foods price of $1.18 to $1.52 an ounce, and Microgreen Manager's customer-type table puts it at $1.75. Even at $1.75, sunflower's 18.77 ounces falls just short of the 18.85 needed, and no other crop comes close.

One caution belongs beside this table. Missouri's labels, packages and marketing make up $12.96 to $24.30 of the tray cost, and those lines are not the same for every buyer. The table shows which way the channel pushes break-even, not a finished budget for any single channel, so replace those three lines with what your own buyer actually requires.

The crops that earn the most per tray-day

Net per tray tells you what one harvest earns. Net per tray-day divides that by the days the tray spends growing, which tells you what a spot on your shelf earns while it is occupied. It is a separate measure from break-even ounces and from the count of crops clearing a price, and it produces its own order.

Pak choi, kale and kohlrabi net the same $8.26 a tray, but pak choi comes out ahead per day because it is ready in about 10.5 days against 13 for kohlrabi. Radish works the same way from lower down. It yields less than mizuna or arugula and nets less per tray, yet at about 8 days it earns more per tray-day than either. Arugula nets $4.51 a tray, the same as mizuna, but its 12.5 days put it at $0.36 and just outside the top eight.

Sunflower's lead is large, at roughly three times komatsuna per tray-day. Keep in mind that this ranking uses $3.75 for every crop. At a restaurant or direct price, every net in the table shrinks by the same amount per ounce, and the crops nearest the line fall below zero first.

Seed is a small share of the money

Seed has to be bought again for every tray, and that is a fair thing to watch. For most crops it is a small slice of what the tray brings in. The median seed cost across the 38 crops is 4.4 percent of revenue at $3.75 an ounce. Mizuna seed costs $0.39 a tray against $37.50 of revenue, and even pak choi, at $2.50 of seed, is set against $41.25. The larger lines in Missouri's budget are labels, packages and marketing, which together can pass $24 a tray.

Sunflower's seed line looks uneven if you check it against its yield, and there is a reason. Its yield of 18.77 ounces is one farm's target at 167 grams of seed, where that seed costs $4.69. The $1.35 seed cost in the spec is the extension rate of 48 grams. The two figures were measured at different seeding rates, so sunflower's seed share looks lower than it would be if you seeded at the rate that produced that yield.

That mismatch changes only the seed-share figure. Net on this page is revenue minus Missouri's total cost, and that total carries its own seed line, so sunflower's $37.40 net and its first-place rank stay the same. If you grow sunflower, budget seed at the rate you actually sow and weigh what that rate gives you.

What these numbers do not settle

Most of the yields come from a single source, often one farm's target, rather than an average across many growers. Johnny's per-variety trial covers only some of the crops. Treat each yield as a figure to test against your own trays, and replace it once you have a few harvests weighed.

Labor sits inside the Missouri total and is not broken out by crop. Missouri assumes 15 minutes a tray, while this site's labor and time per tray guide puts it at 0.257 to 0.567 hours a pound. Time yourself on seeding, harvesting and packing for a week, and use that number instead.

No commercial shrink rate, meaning microgreens harvested and never sold, has been published. Every net on this page assumes the whole tray sells. Count what you compost or give away, because each ounce of it comes straight off your yield.

Nobody publishes a checkable measure of which crops buyers order most. Profitability here means margin against cost. It is not a promise that anyone will buy the tray, and growers themselves name selling as the hard part.

Frequently asked questions

Do premium crops like basil and shiso earn more?

They can at their own price tier. MicroFreshly lists basil, shiso, amaranth, beet and chard at Tier C, $6.25 an ounce, where the break-even yield falls to 5.28 ounces; at that price basil, shiso and amaranth each net $7.63 a tray and Swiss chard nets $26.38. Grow time works against them, since basil takes about 19 days and shiso about 23.

What do farmers markets pay per ounce?

A Vermont Agency of Agriculture and USDA weekly report lists $0.75 an ounce for conventional microgreens and $3.00 for certified organic. The report is undated in the file. At $0.75, no crop in this comparison comes near Missouri's midpoint cost.

Which microgreens do growers actually produce most?

In a survey of 176 US growers from 2018 to 2019, 29 percent grew radish, 28 percent grew sunflower and 27 percent grew pea (Misra and Gibson, Food Protection Trends, 2021). That tells you what is common, not what is most profitable. Pea shoots, at 8.00 ounces, fall short of break-even at $3.75.

Is there any data on which crops buyers order most?

Only one farm's view. Microgreen Manager gives each crop a demand score, which is its own 1 to 10 judgment, and lists its most-grown crops as basil, cilantro, arugula, tendril pea, cabbage and radish. It sends 97 percent of its basil to two wholesalers, which shows how much one account can shape a crop plan.

Choosing your next crop

Start with the buyer, not the seed packet. Pick the channel you can realistically sell through, find its row in the break-even table, and check which crops reach that weight. Then weigh your own trays for those crops and see whether your harvests clear the line with room to spare. For a restaurant account at $3.00, that means sunflower, komatsuna and broccoli have margin, while kale, kohlrabi and pak choi need every ounce of their published yield.

The comparison can tell you which trays cover their cost at a given price. It cannot find the chef, the market stall or the grocery buyer for you, and that is the part to work on before you fill a shelf. This site's channel guides cover restaurants and chefs, farmers markets, grocery and wholesale, subscriptions and pricing, and they are the next place to go once you know which crop pencils out for the buyer you have in mind.

Sources

Yields, days to harvest and seed costs are sourced on each crop's own entry in the variety directory. The break-even yields, crop counts and net figures are arithmetic on those entries against the prices and the per-tray cost below, computed 2026-09-12.

• University of Missouri Extension's March 2024 guide
• MicroFreshly's food-service wholesale list
• Piedmont Microgreens charges $3.00 an ounce for common crops
• Foodomarket in New York lists $3.12
• Two Acre Greens
• Whole Foods price of $1.18 to $1.52 an ounce
• Microgreen Manager's customer-type table
• Vermont Agency of Agriculture and USDA weekly report
• Misra and Gibson, Food Protection Trends, 2021
• Microgreen Manager