This microgreens startup cost calculator shows how many months of sales it takes to earn back what you spend on shelves, lights, trays and setup.
It builds a loss adjusted cost for one tray, scales it to your weekly volume and divides your startup spend by what is left each month. Home growers, side income sellers and anyone sketching a small farm get the most from it.
What It Does and the Problem It Solves
Most guides print one startup number and one profit number then leave you to guess how they connect. This microgreens startup cost calculator joins them.
You get time to recover your startup cost, monthly net, year one return, break even volume, break even price and cost per ounce sold.
The loss allowance carries more weight than it looks. Direct cost is divided by one minus your loss rate, so the default 10 percent lifts every tray's cost by about 11 percent. Trays mold, fail and go unsold.
Your payback time should say so.
Two ideas get mashed together in most spreadsheets and this microgreens startup cost calculator keeps them apart.
Break even volume is the trays per month needed to cover fixed costs. Payback adds the money you spent on gear before the first sale. Different questions.
How to Use It, Step by Step
The microgreens startup cost calculator opens on three starting points: Home grower, Small farm and Commercial concept. Each loads a full set of defaults and Reset returns to them. Change any number afterward and every result updates as you type.
Under Crop, choose one of fifteen varieties or switch to Custom. Seed, yield and days to harvest defaults come from the Johnny's Selected Seeds 2017 yield trial (Johnny's Selected Seeds, 2017).
It sowed 29 varieties and harvested each at the first true leaf. Johnny's calls the figures a jumping off point. Treat them that way.
Yield is the one input worth measuring yourself. Cut a finished tray, weigh it on a kitchen scale before packing and enter those ounces.
Not the number a blog promised you. Type over seed, yield or days to harvest and the variety box flips to Custom. For seed weight the microgreens seed density calculator turns your tray size into grams.
Days under light starts at days to harvest minus three, a blackout assumption you can overwrite. Selling price comes next. Choose per pound, per ounce or per live tray, then enter the price.
Home growers also enter the ounces of greens they will actually eat each week.
Cost per tray holds twelve inputs. Seed price per pound, growing medium, tray price, tray reuses and packaging sit first. Water, labor minutes and hourly wage follow.
Light watts per tray, light hours, electricity rate and loss rate finish the block.
Time the labor with a stopwatch across seeding, watering, harvest and packing. Divide a fixture's rated watts by the trays under it for light watts per tray. Leaving the wage at zero is a choice so make it on purpose.
Last comes Scale and startup: trays harvested per week, fixed costs per month and startup and equipment cost.
This microgreens startup cost calculator treats startup as a one-time spend so count shelving, lights, trays, a scale and fans and leave monthly bills out.
How to Read Your Results
The large banner in the microgreens startup cost calculator reads Time to recover your startup cost.
Under a month it shows days. Past a month it shows months and past twelve it adds years. Zero or negative monthly net turns it red with the words Not at these numbers.
Below it, year one return is twelve months of net minus startup, divided by startup. A 249 percent return means the first year repays the gear and then some.
A negative return like the Commercial concept preset's means year one ends in the red even if payback eventually arrives.
The cost per tray panel splits cost into seed, medium, tray cost per use, packaging, electricity, water and labor each with its own bar segment.
Direct cost, loss allowance and loss adjusted cost follow, then revenue and profit per tray. Check the bar first. With wages entered, labor usually dominates. Labor mostly.
The monthly panel lists trays, revenue, tray costs, fixed costs and net, plus break even volume in trays per month and per week.
Break even price is the price per pound, ounce or tray at which a tray stops losing money before fixed costs. Cost per ounce sold sets your floor for any wholesale quote.
Change one input at a time. A microgreens startup cost calculator is most honest when you can see which single number moves payback the most.
Flags help: yields under 4 ounces, per pound prices outside $25 to $50, volume below break even and payback past 36 months all trigger one.
Who This Is Built For
Home growers get a preset that values greens at retail price but counts only what you will eat.
The defaults, two trays a week and $63.37 of gear, already flag that you would use about 77 percent of the harvest. Different goals.
Different presets.
Side-income sellers start from the Small farm preset: 12 trays a week, $2,326.04 of startup, $28 per pound.
Anyone drafting a microgreens business plan can load the Commercial concept: 960 trays a month, $109,284 of startup, $6,000 monthly fixed costs.
Once payback looks sane, run the same crop through the Microgreens Profit Calculator which tests margin against a 75 percent target line.
The Bigger Picture
The question "how much does it cost to start a microgreens business" has no single answer. The three presets here run from $63.37 to $109,284 a spread of more than 1,700 times.
The large figure needs context. In the Alberta concept business (Alberta Agriculture and Forestry, 2018), $60,000 of the $109,284 buys the facility and $10,000 a delivery vehicle.
Strip out the building and the equipment bill is $49,284 with $19,200 of it in lights. The fact sheet names no currency, and its second table lists $109,584 so read the figures as a scale marker not a quote.
That model took about three years to pay back with two full time staff at $20 an hour. A solo grower who already owns the space faces a different bill and a different clock.
Enter your real rent in fixed costs and this microgreens startup cost calculator shows whether those three years shrink or grow.
Variety matters as much as scale.
So is microgreens farming profitable? Sometimes. In that same Alberta room, broccoli sold as full trays at $30 earned $12,057.60 a year. Basil lost $9,323.52 at the same price because its long cycle and delicate handling push labor up.
Some guides print startup recovery in three to five weeks which assumes every tray sells at full price. In this microgreens startup cost calculator a 30 percent loss rate moves Small farm payback from about 3.4 months to 4.1.
Real Scenarios
The Northeast SARE final report (Northeast SARE, 2021) describes a New Hampshire farm that turned a cold storage room into a grow room for $2,326.04.
Its trays averaged 7.31 ounces, significantly below Johnny's trial and harvest and packing took 15 minutes each.
Load the Small farm preset and the default 11.5 ounce yield returns payback in about 3.4 months.
Run this microgreens startup cost calculator again with 7.31 ounces and it stretches to about 7.9. Same room. Same price. Yield did that.
Now load Commercial concept. Payback lands near 36 months, close to the three years Alberta reported and year one return is negative 66 percent.
Break even volume is about 636 trays a month, two-thirds of the 960 the room can produce just to cover fixed costs.
Reaching that volume depends on where the trays go. Where to Sell Microgreens: Market vs Restaurant Sales compares restaurant and farmers market profit per tray.
Accuracy has limits in any microgreens startup cost calculator. Permits, insurance, food safety licensing and taxes are not in the math. Defaults are averages from trials and fact sheets so read the output as a planning figure.
Run your numbers through this microgreens startup cost calculator before you buy the first light using the weighed yield from one test tray. If the banner says Not at these numbers, the break even price line shows exactly what your selling price has to beat.
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