Introduction

Is it worth it to spend the time, effort, and money to get your microgreen farm GAP certified? The short answer is yes; the longer answer is it depends on how big your farm is and how many third‑party buyers are in your area. A third‑party buyer is any intermediary such as a retailer, a wholesaler, or a public entity, like a public school system or a military base—someone that receives federal funding. I'll be sharing my advice as a microgreen farm owner of five years, HGAP certified for the last two years, and growing about 400 trays per week.

Why is GAP Required?

To set a little bit of context, GAP stands for Good Agricultural Practices, and it's a voluntary food safety certification offered by the USDA. The main reason to get GAP certified is because a buyer requires it, typically an intermediary such as a retailer or wholesaler. There are three tiers to the GAP certification: GAP, Harmonized GAP (HGAP), and Harmonized GAP+ (HGAP+). HGAP+ is the USDA equivalent of the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI), an internationally recognized standard often considered the gold standard for voluntary food safety audits. So, if GAP and its equivalents are a voluntary certification, why pursue it? As we mentioned, it will be required by intermediaries and larger buyers. Some people call it a “market‑access” certification, meaning no entity is mandating it by law or regulation. You do it voluntarily to gain access to more buyers. More buyers obviously means more revenue. When framed this way, it sounds like a no‑brainer. Get certified and you gain access to more companies willing to spend more money buying higher volumes, albeit at a lower cost per unit, than those that don’t require certification. Unfortunately, we need to factor in the time, effort, and money to both get certified and maintain the record‑keeping and standards of the certification year to year in order to make this a fair assessment.

Time & Cost

Again, I'm sharing my perspective as a farm owner who pursued the middle tier of HGAP certification rather than the base-level GAP certification typically requested. As an indoor microgreen farmer, it is relatively easy to get GAP certified compared to a conventional market garden or outdoor farm. It's significantly easier for indoor microgreen farmers because we don't have many of the considerations that an outdoor farm has. For example, we usually use municipal water instead of surface water or well water, which means the burden of testing that water for pathogens is on the municipality, not on the farmer. That saves a ton of time, effort, and record keeping. We also don't have many external contaminants to consider. Most microgreen farmers don't use compost, there are no animals on the farm, no runoff, and no pollutants from neighboring plots or farms. Many variables relevant to maintaining proper food safety simply aren't a factor because they don't exist when you farm indoors. As a result, the time, cost, and effort of achieving and maintaining your GAP certification is, in my opinion, very easy—especially after the first year, once you’ve set up your initial food safety plan and record‑keeping systems.

Time: We spent about six months preparing for our first audit. That six‑month clock started when we reached out to an organization that specializes in helping small farmers pursue things like organic and GAP certifications. We are lucky to be in North Carolina and have the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association (CFSA) as a nearly free resource. We were assigned someone from the organization to walk us through every step of the audit preparation process, visit our farm, provide feedback, give us a full food safety plan template to fill in and modify to the specifics of our farm, and much more. As the farm owner, I handled the audit preparation—spending about 10 hours per week over six months—by building systems, creating the food‑safety plan, training the team, and coordinating with CFSA while the team kept the farm operating. Each of my farm assistants spent about 10 hours total reviewing material and learning about food safety. Their training was commensurate with their responsibilities. My farm manager and I, as the primary and secondary food safety managers, attended a full eight‑hour day with the Produce Safety Alliance (PSA), earning a certificate. That training was also commensurate with our level of responsibility for food safety on the farm. Ever since passing our first audit and earning our first certification, we spend about three hours a week maintaining our records and upholding our food safety standards. We spend about 5–10 hours a week as we approach our next audit because we need to update our food‑safety plan, verify that our standards are current, check for new USDA requirements, perform a mock recall, and handle anything else needed to be ready for the auditor.

Cost: The explicit cost of preparing for your first audit is going to be higher than preparing for subsequent audits. That's not to mention the implicit cost of all the time spent, and therefore the payroll cost, doing the things we just discussed. It makes sense that preparing for your first audit would cost more than subsequent audits because you're making one‑time purchases for items like a lockable chemical cabinet, PPE, and other replacements that are not cleanable or sanitizable, or are not made of USDA‑approved materials. However, more than the cost of these items is the auditor’s time and the certification fees. The last time I checked, the hourly rate for an auditor was $167, including drive time. Speaking only for North Carolina, I believe our state has only two to three auditors, meaning the closest auditor could be a full day's drive away, all charged at $167 per hour. Of course, there’s the time spent on site performing the audit, and after the auditor leaves your farm, they spend another few hours compiling their notes and submitting them to the USDA for processing. Finally, the USDA has its own processing and certification fees. In all, we spent between $1,200 and $1,400 on our explicit audit costs each time we were audited.

What Nobody Talks About

The time and costs outlined above aren't a huge burden if you're aiming to become a multi‑six‑figure farm, especially once you have the market access granted by the certification. I would say that every customer of ours that requires GAP certification brings in at least tens of thousands of dollars a year, if not close to $100,000 a year in revenue. The profit from just one of these customers more than covers the implicit and explicit costs of earning and maintaining your GAP certification. This is why I started the article by saying that the short answer is that GAP certification is worth it. What I realized before getting our first certification, but didn’t fully internalize, is the cost of all this work and record‑keeping for customers who don’t require GAP. When you get GAP certified, or at least for our HGAP certification, you can't pick and choose who you perform these standards of record keeping, food safety, and compliance for. You might have a hundred customers and only five of them—albeit the biggest five—require GAP. In this example, you have 95 customers who never asked for GAP, don’t know what GAP is, don’t care about GAP, don’t care about your lot tracking, traceability, food safety program, or anything else. However, your farm is GAP certified, which means you must uphold these standards for all 100 customers. It might sound trivial, but when you're harvesting thousands of containers every week for these hundred customers, you have to perform a lot of data entry, record keeping, and compliance for customers you would have whether you had this certification or not. So, if the ratio of customers—or the ratio of revenue—from customers that don’t require GAP to the revenue from customers that do require GAP is very high, it will feel like you’re wasting a lot of time upholding these standards for no reason. As we’ve pointed out, upholding these standards has both an implicit and an explicit cost, and the implicit cost will be much higher after those one‑time purchases of PPE and otherwise. It's for this very reason that I understand why farms, as they scale higher and higher, eventually abandon smaller customers. Those customers begin to demand a disproportionate amount of the farm's time and attention to fulfill small orders. Even if those orders are higher‑margin, higher‑profit orders, they increasingly become chump change compared to large wholesalers and national retailers.

I've gotten a little off topic. I want to address the second point from the introduction. The longer answer to whether GAP certification is worthwhile depends on the size of your farm—or the size you’re aiming for—and the number of third‑party buyers in your service area. If you only have access to a few third‑party buyers, such as wholesalers and retail outlets that require GAP certification, it may or may not be worth the cost and time of getting GAP certified, especially if those buyers don’t sell a ton of microgreens in their business. It also won't be worth getting GAP certified if you don't want to grow past a certain size in your business. If you want to keep your microgreen farm simple, super local, low effort—if you don't want to hire people, get a commercial space, or deal with the headache of certification and additional standards—it's not worth it. Keep selling to local restaurants, caterers, farmers markets, and home consumers, and you can still make good money as a farm owner.

My Advice

I'll wrap up my thoughts with a small piece of advice that will help you make more of your first-year audit costs if you decide to get GAP certified. I highly recommend you start networking and attending food and farming conferences to meet buyers such as retailers and wholesalers who want to buy GAP‑certified food, especially from small local farms. Even if you are years away from getting GAP certified, you want to start networking as soon as possible. I remember meeting our now biggest buyer, who requires GAP certification, at a food and farming conference four years ago, three years before our first audit, and they expressed interest in buying GAP‑certified microgreens. Every year we saw each other at the same conference. Every year we checked in on the progress we were—or weren’t—making toward our GAP certification, and they continued to reinforce their desire to buy GAP‑certified microgreens. As we finally started preparing for our first audit and approached the audit date, we kept this buyer and other buyers in the loop so they knew we were going to be GAP certified soon. As soon as we received confirmation from our auditor that we passed certification, we immediately emailed those customers to start the selling process. Putting the effort to network ahead of time like this was instrumental in growing our farm by multiple six figures after we passed our GAP certification.

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