The 20 Microgreen Varieties Every Farm Should Offer
Jan 12th, '25
Written by Garrett Corwin
Introduction
One of the most popular North American seed suppliers, True Leaf Market, offers 302 options for “microgreen seeds.” Without digressing too far, you can grow microgreens with any “normal” seeds. If we expand our search to include all annual crops, True Leaf Market offers 889 options. The point is there are far too many options for what you can reasonably offer on your menu. How do you decide what to grow and what to offer your chefs, wholesalers, and home consumers? After seven years of farming, and four of growing only microgreens, my menu is stable. We rarely add or take away offerings, nor do we often replace one cultivar with another. For example, maintaining mustard on our menu, but swapping Scarlet Frills Mustard for Ruby Streaks Mustard. We’ve grown and offered at least 80 distinct cultivars at my farm, Piedmont Microgreens, over the years, but we’ve settled on 24. Using those 24 cultivars, we also offer six unique blends. Below are my top 20 picks for cultivars every established microgreen farm should offer on their menu. Everyone’s market is unique, but farmers online report their customers have the same or similar preferences as mine. I’ll back up claims with real data from my farm and the 15,000+ trays we grew in 2024.
The List
| Essentials | Bonus | Rare |
|---|---|---|
| Arugula | Amaranth | Anise Hyssop |
| Basil, Genovese | Celery | Cantaloupe |
| Beet | Chervil | Fenugreek |
| Broccoli | Other Basils | Lemon Balm |
| Cabbage | Dill | Mint |
| Cilantro | Fava | Oregano |
| Kale | Fennel | Sage |
| Kohlrabi | Lettuce | Sorrel |
| Mustard | Onion | Thyme |
| Nasturtium | Parsley | All Others |
| Pea, Basic | Shiso | Edible Flowers |
| Pea, Tendril | Swiss Chards | |
| Radish, Rambo | ||
| Radish, Triton | ||
| Sunflower |
The Reasoning
The Essentials list has the most popular crop varieties, regardless of the farm. If you ask people online, most will agree the varieties in the Essentials list are their best sellers. These varieties also have higher gross profit margins because they grow fast and yield well. Every farmer should master these crops first. Bonus varieties are good to have, but they’re advanced offerings. It takes longer to learn how to grow specialty varieties, like shiso, parsley, and celery. Granted, it’s as hard or harder to learn basil and beet, but they’re also in higher demand. Bonus crops still have good gross profit margins but are not as popular. The Rare column is for the hardest crops. It's for those with low demand or low profit margins. For example, red-veined sorrel is popular, but it’s very difficult to grow. Sorrel takes longer to grow than any other variety, it requires a lot of labor to harvest by hand, and it’s not very profitable.
Use your best judgment when assessing each category. For example, we use Field Pea as our “basic” pea offering. You can use one of the dozens of similar varieties, like Dunn Pea, Green Pea, Speckled Pea, or Sugar Pea. For a cheap pop of color, use Rambo Radish. Also, use a "regular" radish variety, like Hong Vit, Triton, or Red Arrow. We'll also see that many of the Essential varieties rarely get ordered individually. This includes cabbage, broccoli, kale, kohlrabi, mustard, arugula, and radish. These varieties rank high for volume grown because they’re part of our best-selling blends. Below is a screenshot from my Farm Report on Microgreen Manager for 2024. Cilantro, basil, beet, tendril pea, and celery rank high. Most of these sell solo, although cilantro is present in our Taco Mix. Otherwise, broccoli, cabbage, and kohlrabi are high on the list because together they make our Nutrition Mix. Arugula, mustard, Triton radish, and Rambo radish rank high because together they make our Spicy Salad Mix. The radishes also appear in our Taco Mix. You can see that we grow everything after the top 16 crops <1% of the time.
What’s grown and what’s sold don’t always match up. Let’s look at my data for 2024 from our QuickBooks Online account. The first screenshot is for wholesale. Again, our best sellers are the Nutrition Mix, tendril peas, cilantro, basil, celery, beet, and arugula. The Nutrition Mix has broccoli, cabbage, and kohlrabi. The Heart Blend is a custom blend we make as a private-label product.
We only offer six products for retail. Again, though, the Nutrition Mix and Spicy Salad Mix are our top sellers.
Moving on to our restaurant sales, we’ll see the same pattern. The top sellers are tendril peas, cilantro, sunflower, radish, basil, beet, Spicy Salad Mix, and Nutrition Mix. What’s funny is that our delivery fee of $5.00 ranks higher in the sales report than a vast majority of varieties. Chervil, celery, nasturtium leaves, dill, and yellow chard only rank high due to one or two customers. These are not varieties with mass appeal. It's great to find a specific variety that a customer wants in bulk. However, you should not target these varieties at the start of your journey.
In summary, I suggest you begin by learning the 15 varieties in the Essentials list. Once you’ve mastered those crops, pick five from the Bonus list. Learn those, offer them to your customers, and see how they perform. If your sales data doesn't support keeping them on your menu, try different crops from the Bonus list. Find a handful that a few customers really like. I would entirely avoid the list of Rare crops. Unless a long-term customer asks for them specifically and they have a history of buying crops they specifically demand, your attention is better spent elsewhere.
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