How Much Do You Want to Earn From Your Microgreens Farm in the UK?
I could list at least 20 different solid benefits of running your own microgreens farm to make a living. Benefits to yourself, your local community and the wider population as a whole. The focus of my article today, however, is on the benefit of making money from growing and selling microgreens. At the end of the day, if food growing businesses aren’t profitable, they can’t exist, and therefore neither will all the incredible benefits this business model provides.
So, how much do you want to earn from your microgreens farm? £250 a week? £3,000 a week? Whatever your figure is, great. That will be your aim. Within the first few months of running your microgreens business, it’s useful to have the figure that you’d ideally like to be reaching from your microgreens sales.
However, and that’s a big however, putting a number on something that you don’t have experience in is also really difficult to do. It’s why I’ve always struggled with the cash forecasts on new business plans. If you haven’t tested it out yet, how do you know what’s possible for the market in your area, and for the time and resources you have? This blog post will hopefully give you a good overview of the numbers that are realistically possible from small scale microgreens farming in the UK but, more importantly, it will highlight how crucial intention is in enabling you to grow your business.
The amount of money you can make from selling microgreens is determined by three main factors:
✔️ How many people you have to sell them to (the market).
✔️ How much time you want to spend in the business (labour resources).
✔️ How much space you have available for growing, processing and storage (your resources).
Whenever I advise people on starting their own microgreens businesses, I always recommend the same thing at the beginning - start small and grow gradually. That way you learn the business in a sustainable way, in that you get to a comfortable stage with your supply before moving up to the next level. Also, when you’re planning this business you don’t really know how big your market is until you actually start selling to them, or how much time everything’s going to take. When you do get that experience though, usually after the first few months or so, it’s then much easier to set your revenue goals.
This was me in early 2017. I was growing a grand total of 3 trays of microgreens a week, then delivering them by bike to a few cafes and restaurants in Leeds City Centre (about 5 miles away). At the time I called it my little Friday Project and it was so nice to just get out of the office once a week, cut and package plants and get some exercise doing it. Fast forward 3 years and I was growing 90 trays of microgreens a week and sadly had to upgrade to a van for my deliveries!
I started (loosely) planning my microgreens business, Nell’s Urban Greens, in the January of 2017. I was working Monday to Thursday in my job at the time, so I had a bit of wiggle room to slowly start piecing together my business and start growing small practice batches of microgreens. When I’d built enough confidence up in my micros (mostly due to positive feedback from friends and family!), I started selling my first greens to a couple of chefs in Leeds from May of that same year. By July time, I had a much clearer idea of the potential of scaling up. They were received well by chefs and home customers were already asking how they can buy my greens too. So I had a good idea that the market was there, I knew how long all my tasks took me and I knew roughly how many microgreens I could grow in the space I had available (our conservatory). That same month I handed my notice in at work and by the beginning of October, I started running my microgreens farm full itme.
Setting your first revenue goal
It was only at this point I was able to properly set my first revenue goal. For me at the time, I just wanted to make £300/week profit. That meant I could (just about) support my life financially. I was too scared at the time to set my goals any higher!
My advice for you - start growing and selling a small number of microgreens first to your local community. Get into the swing of it, decide if you enjoy it, find out you have a market to sell to, then start setting revenue goals.
Be clear on exactly how much you’d like to be making from your business. For some, it will be to earn a few extra pounds a week to supplement a job income, for others, you’ll want microgreens to provide your full time salary. If you’re in the latter camp, decide what that figure is. And I recommend you calculate it weekly. It’s much easier to reach weekly revenue goals than having a massive yearly number to hit that doesn’t feel realistic to you.
Say you’d like to earn £500/week profit from microgreens. First of all add 30% onto that. This will be for your expenses, give or take. I used to aim for, and hit, 25% expenses a year on my business. As costs have gone up in the last few years though, my ball park is now 30%. I’m currently at 28% for this year 24/25.
Using this example, you’ll need to sell £750 of microgreens a week to turn a £500 profit. You can do this on just 4 grow racks. If you want to know exactly how to produce enough microgreens to generate £200/week per grow rack, here’s my blog post teaching you how.
This amount of revenue will amount to producing around 300 punnets/week, depending on customer type and price points. You can break this down to 150 punnets produced on two diffrerent days of the week, if 300 seems like too many to do in a day.
Check out my past blog post on detailing what you can produce, and therefore earn, from each of these grow racks per week. You can then calculate your weekly revenue figure, depending on how many of these you can fit into your space.
Read here - A Simple Microgreens Grow Rack Set Up in the UK
If I’d have heard these numbers when I was starting out, it would’ve seemed like an unachievable goal! Especially as I didn’t know anyone else doing this in the UK at the time who I could take inspiration from and see that it’s possible. If you’re equally terrified by the amount of microgreens you need to sell to generate enough income for you, then I recommend splitting it down to £50 increments - it really works! This also really helps to not take on too much, too soon. When you first start trading, work hard to get enough customers in order to generate a regular £50 a week in sales. Keep pushing and reaching out to potential new customers until you reach that goal. Then celebrate it! That’s really important. Then the next push is to get to £100. When you reach it, celebrate it, then move on to £150 and so on until you reach your target. If you reach your target and everything’s running smoothly and sustainably, break on through it if you want to! By following this method, I ended up reaching £1200/week in my 3rd year (I purposefully took it slow too!). A figure I’d have felt was way too overwhelming when I started.
So no matter what financial goal you set for your microgreens business, just make sure you have one! It will make sure you design and run your business intentionally, which will give you a really good shot at reaching it!
✔ Create your goal using actual experience you’ve gained from making your first few months of sales, rather than only using what you read on the internet!
✔ Setting a weekly sales target (as opposed to a monthly or annual one) helps it feel more achievable.
✔ Splitting your weekly sales goal down into smaller increments, means you can celebrate the small wins along the way which is massively motivating!
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.