Are Microgreens Profitable in the UK?
If you haven’t got long, then the answer is - Yes! They are, as long as you run your business properly. And I highly recommend you do start your own microgreens business from home, especially if you like growing plants, want to work to your own schedule and connect with your local community. It’s brilliant!
If you’ve got a little longer, then I’ll tell you:
✔ How profitable selling microgreens can be,
✔ How you can maximise this profit,
✔ And the 2 key parts of your business that your profit margins are dependent upon.
I see this question floating around the various microgreens business Facebook groups alot, including my own - Farm Microgreens UK Community. It’s a really valid question, so I thought I’d answer it here in as realistic and honest a way as possible. I’m just heading into the 8th year of running my own microgreens business, Nell’s Urban Greens in Leeds, UK, so I know the current numbers pretty well.
I’ve been running Nell’s since the beginning of 2017. The business was in profit after 4 weeks of me trading and has continued to be so ever since. A quick note about profit:
If you run your business as a sole trader, as opposed to setting it up as a Limited Company, then when I refer to profit I mean all the money that is left over after you’ve taken all of your expenses out of your sales total, not including paying yourself. If you set up your business as a Limited Company, then profit is the cash that’s left over in your business after all outgoings, including: operating costs, salaries and corporation tax. I’ve always run Nell’s as a sole trader, and I know many other small scale micros producers in the UK do aswell, so when I refer to profit throughout the rest of this article, I’ll be referring to all the cash that’s left over after just the expenses have been taken off your sales totals.
The profit you can generate from growing and selling microgreens in the UK:
Annually, you should aim to hit at least 70% profit on everything you sell, so that means spending no more than 30% on your operating expenses. Mine’s currently sitting at 27% expenses, 73% profit at 8 months into this financial year. And this covers ALL business expenses, not just the ones to produce each tray.
These percentages will differ from month to month, depending on what you need to buy, but these percentage targets should be what you’re aiming for over a full 12 months of trading. My business has never exceeded 30% expenses in 7 and a half years. So this is at least one solid, real life example of how microgreens are profitable in the UK. AND I take every Friday, Saturday (minus an hour in the morning) and Sunday off. So it’s definitely a profitable business to be in.
If you want actual numbers, here’s an example from 1 tray of microgreens:
✔ 1 tray of Rambo (purple) Radish Microgreens from Grow Sow Greener costs £21.50/kilo, when you have a business account set up with them and buy in bulk (5kg+).
✔ For each microgreens tray, 45g of dry radish seed will produce 300g+ of radish microgreens in 7 - 9 days. That amount of seed costs 97p and compost per tray is now around the 35p mark, coir’s cheaper.
✔ That’s a total tray cost of £1.32.
✔ You can sell 40g punnets of radish microgreens for £2.50 to chefs and £3 to the public.
So your tray profit here will be £17.43 (selling at £2.50) and
£21.18 (selling at £3).
Full business profit (at 70%) on this tray of microgreens is £13.13 (selling at £2.50) and £15.75 (seling at £3).
And these are real life numbers, from a real life operating microgreens farm in the UK, as of 26th November 2024!
If you’re hitting at least 70% profit margins in your microgreens business, then your business will remain financially sustainable.
So how do you do everything you can to make sure you’re able to hit this 70/30% target each year?
You need to maximise your profit margins by:
✔ Streamlining your processes;
✔ Spending less money;
✔ Optimising your individual grow tray production;
✔ Finding the sweet spot between pricing and sales numbers.
Read more detail on these here: 4 Practical Ways to Maximise Your Profit Margins.
And I’ll pull the main two of these out for this article today:
The 2 key parts of your microgreens business that your profit depends upon: overheads & the number of sales you make.
1. Overheads
I can’t stress enough how useful keeping your overheads as low as possible is for maximising your profits. You can start a microgreens business on a shoestring, so make the most of that! Some small bags of microgreens seeds from Grow Sow Greener, a seed tray, some compost and a brightish windowsill is all you need to get growing and see if you enjoy it. If you do, and you have space at home to grow in and local people who have already enjoyed your samples and others who are keen to try, then you might want to scale up and turn this into a proper business.
Your capital overheads (in other words stuff you only probably need to buy once) will include: Grow Racks, LED lights, microgreens grow trays, a work table, fridge, dehumidifier, sharp knife, digital weighing scale & fans.
Your consumable overheads (the stuff that you use to produce your products that needs to be bought regularly) will include: Seed, compost/coco coir, packaging, labels, cleaning stuff, energy (usually electricity), vehicle fuel & maintenance, rent (if renting out premises).
You can minimise your overheads by:
1. Not buying stuff you don’t need to run the business profitably.
2. Buying your consumable inventory in bulk to access (sometimes significant!) discounts.
3. Keeping your business at home, or in the garden.
4. Making sure your grow room is well insulated, so that all your energy costs goes into actually producing microgreens and not to heat the outside.
2. Number of sales you make
If you earn 70% on every punnet of microgreens you sell, then the more you sell, the more profit you’ll make. Pretty straight forward. If you feel that your expenses percentage is creeping up past 30%, and you’re minimising your overheads as much as possible, streamlining your work tasks and optimising your tray production, then it’s time to try and add more customers onto your weekly supply! You’re heating the room anyway and you’re set up to harvest, pack and deliver, so adding more sales into this process will boost your profit margins. And ideally, these will be regularly increasing sales.
So many numbers get thrown around when it comes to the profit margins of microgreens. I wanted to share a clear and real life version of these as it stands today in the UK’s small scale microgreens industry. A microgreens business is not a get rich quick scheme, but what it is for me and can be for you, is an extremely enjoyable, long term enterprise from which you can make either a full or part time salary from, run it from home and reap the rewards of the satisfaction that you’re growing delicious, healthy food for your local community.
If you’re at the point where you’re super keen to get your microgreens business up and running, but want to know the exact steps to take to do this in the UK, then my UK Microgreens Business Course will get you there!
I’ll be opening it back up for enrolments this Thursday 28th November!
It’s an online detailed video course that takes you through all the aspects of the business you need to know and develop skills in in order to set up, run and scale up your own financially sustainable and enjoyable microgreens farm from home.
Here are all the details of the curriculum and link to buy when it opens :)
(And if you’re reading this in the future, it will be open again soon!)
Hi! I’m Amy Wright and I run my own microgreens farm in Leeds , UK.
I also teach people how to set up their own home based microgreens business, specifically in the UK.
If you’re keen to get started growing your first microgreens crops and selling them to your first paying customers, let me teach you how.