A chef is not buying microgreens. A chef is buying the certainty that on Thursday at nine in the morning the same pea shoots will arrive, at the same height, in the same quantity, and that this will still be true in a month and in a year. Taste and appearance get judged in thirty seconds. The rest of the decision is about you, not the product.
It helps to know what kind of market you are walking into. In 2020, 147,307 U.S. farms sold food directly to consumers, retailers, institutions, and intermediaries, for $9 billion. Sales to retailers, the USDA category that covers restaurants, caterers, independent groceries, and food co-ops, came to $1.9 billion, down from $2.3 billion five years earlier. Fewer farms sold directly to retailers, 24,137, than to any other buyer type. The number of farms selling locally fell 12 percent over the same five years.
Read that as a working condition, not a warning. Restaurant accounts are a channel with fewer farms in it than the farmers market, and one where the buyer is a professional who will ask professional questions. The first of those questions is usually about paperwork.
What you are under federal law
Start with the question that decides which rules apply to you: are microgreens sprouts? FDA answers it in writing. “We note that microgreens and sprouts are different products.” Sprouts are harvested before true leaves appear; “in contrast, microgreens reach a later stage of growth, typically associated with the emergence of ‘true’ leaves.” Unlike sprouts under Subpart M, microgreens are typically grown in soil or substrate and harvested above the soil or substrate line.
The consequence is stated just as plainly: “Because microgreens are not sprouts, they are not subject to the requirements in Subpart M. However, microgreens are considered covered produce for the purposes of the Produce Safety Rule and, unless exempt or excluded under the provisions in Subpart A, microgreens are subject to the other subparts of the Produce Safety Rule.”
That sentence saves you from the heaviest requirements in the rule. Sprout operations have to test spent irrigation water from every production batch and hold the batch until the result is negative. You do not. What remains is the rest of Part 112: water, worker training, equipment and tools, soil amendments, records. We covered the wider picture of what FSMA changed and what it did not separately.
Where you sit on the exemption ladder
Part 112 has two money thresholds, both adjusted for inflation from a 2011 baseline, and both worth knowing by heart because they decide how much of the rule reaches you.
The first: a farm with an average annual value of produce sold over the previous three years above $25,000 in 2011 dollars is a covered farm. FDA republishes the adjusted number every April. For the three years 2023 through 2025 the cutoff is $34,324. Below that average, the rule does not reach your farm at all.
The second: a qualified exemption, which takes two conditions at once. Your average annual sales of all food over the previous three years must be under $500,000 in 2011 dollars, which is $686,476 for 2023 through 2025. And your direct sales to qualified end-users must exceed your sales to every other buyer combined.
Now the part that matters for this article. A qualified end-user is the consumer of the food, where consumer does not include a business, or “a restaurant or retail food establishment that is located in the same State or the same Indian reservation as the farm that produced the food, or not more than 275 miles from such farm.”
Restaurant accounts in your own state count toward keeping your exemption. Sales through a distributor or a wholesaler do not. Two farms with identical revenue can land on opposite sides of the rule purely because one sells to fifteen local kitchens and the other sells the same volume to one regional distributor.
One caveat on the arithmetic. FDA allowed temporary flexibility in the qualified exemption criteria during the pandemic; that policy ended November 7, 2023, and the agency expects farms to be back to ordinary three-year averaging by 2027. Run your numbers on the current rule, not on what a neighbor did in 2021.
What the exemption costs you
A qualified exemption is not a pass on everything. Two obligations survive it, and both show up in a restaurant relationship.
Labeling. Where a package label is required, you must include, prominently and conspicuously, the name and complete business address of the farm where the produce was grown. Where no package label is required, the same information has to be displayed at the point of purchase, on a label, poster, sign, placard, or documents delivered with the produce in the normal course of business. Complete address means street address or post office box, city, state, and ZIP code. A clamshell with a farm name and a city on it does not satisfy this.
Records. You have to keep records adequate to show you qualify, including a written record of an annual review and verification that the farm is still eligible. Sales receipts kept in the normal course of business work, and for those FDA waives the signature requirement, but the receipts still have to be dated. In practice this is one folder and one hour every January. Those records fit neatly into a wider log of sowing, watering and temperature by day and by batch; how to keep one that actually gets filled in is covered in the wiki entry on production logs for daily and batch records.
Worth remembering: the exemption can be withdrawn. Subpart R lets FDA pull it, and the trigger is usually an outbreak investigation that reaches your farm. What that looks like from the inside is visible in the record of sprout companies that keep reappearing in outbreak reports.
What the buyer asks for beyond the law
Federal requirements are the floor. The buyer’s own list is usually longer, and it is a contract matter rather than a legal one, which means every item on it is negotiable until you sign.
Expect these, in roughly this order:
- a certificate of liability insurance, often with the buyer named as additionally insured and sometimes with a waiver of subrogation, renewed annually and sent by your agency directly to them;
- a food safety audit, most often GAP, which distributors treat as close to mandatory and independent restaurants often waive;
- an invoice with every single delivery, emailed ahead or handed over on arrival, matching the purchase order in quantity, price, and date;
- a label carrying product name, farm name and address, pack date, and lot number;
- an availability calendar showing what you will have, starting when, and for how many weeks.
The invoice item is the one new growers underestimate. Extension guidance on selling to distributors puts it bluntly: an invoice is always required, and skipping it delays both the receiving dock and your payment. A kitchen that has to chase paperwork for a $200 delivery will stop chasing and buy from someone else.
Insurance deserves a sentence of its own, because the quoted premium usually surprises people in the right direction. Product liability for a small produce operation is priced off your sales volume, and at the scale of a few dozen trays a week it costs less than one month of your electricity. It is also the item most likely to end the conversation if you do not have it.
Pricing: start high enough to stay
Two rules carry most of the weight here.
First, know whether your price is FOB your farm or delivered, and say which one it is on the price sheet. Fuel and driver time on a two-account route can eat a quarter of the margin, and a delivered price that ignores them is a slow loss. What the margin on a single tray actually is, line by line, is set out in the cost breakdown of one 1020 tray.
Second, resist the instinct to underprice your way in. Extension guidance says it directly: setting your price too low to build demand is not recommended, because it sets buyer expectations you will not be able to meet in the long term. Raising a price later means renegotiating with the same chef who already has your number in a spreadsheet. Come in at a number you can hold for a year, and compete on delivery reliability rather than on cents per ounce.
Price by variety, not by tray. Pea shoots yield the most cut weight per tray from inexpensive seed; radish and mustard cost more in seed and yield less. The shelf data behind that spread, and the two university benchmarks that disagree about it, are in what chefs actually pay per ounce. A single flat price per tray across your whole list almost always means some varieties travel at a loss. Which varieties return the most per tray, according to a university enterprise budget, is laid out in the piece on startup budgets.
Set a minimum order before your first delivery, not after. It is a normal term, every buyer expects it, and without one you will find yourself driving across a metro area with two clamshells in the back.
The pitch itself
Timing first. Walk in between three and five in the afternoon, when prep is underway and service has not started. A call at one thirty on a Friday gets a no regardless of what you grow.
Bring four things: samples of three varieties in the exact packaging you plan to deliver in, fully labeled; a one-page price sheet with variety, pack size, price, and minimum order; your delivery days and the cutoff time for ordering; and a short answer on your food safety status, whether that is an audit certificate or an honest description of your practices and your records.
Leave samples free and without conditions, but no more than twice. After that it is either an order or a kitchen getting free garnish.
The questions you will get are predictable: how long does it hold after cutting, will this same variety exist in two months, what happens if I need triple for a banquet, and who delivers if you are sick. “I am a one-person farm” is an acceptable answer. Promising volume you cannot grow is not, and it is the single most common way new growers lose an account in month three.
On shelf life, be precise rather than enthusiastic. Cut microgreens hold about five to seven days, which is a routing constraint more than a selling point: deliver on the day of harvest or the next morning, or the kitchen receives a product with half its life already spent.
How many accounts one person can carry
Delivery is the constraint that decides your account count, and it is worth respecting the geography that the national data shows: 78 percent of farms selling directly move all of that food within 100 miles of the farm. That is not a preference, it is what the math of a refrigerated vehicle and a perishable product allows.
A workable sequence looks like this. Five to eight accounts first, with you personally checking every box that leaves. Then fifteen to twenty, with two fixed delivery days and a route that does not double back. Only then full capacity. A farm that signs forty accounts in a month and misses half its deliveries does not get those accounts back: a chef who has been let down twice has already found another supplier.
Payment terms belong in this conversation too. Restaurants commonly pay on their own cycle rather than on delivery. Agree on terms in writing, on the invoice or in a short supply agreement, and raise the question at the first meeting rather than after the second delivery.
What to do this week
Before you walk into the first kitchen:
- run your three-year average produce sales against $34,324 and your three-year average food sales against $686,476, and write down which side of each line you are on;
- if you are relying on a qualified exemption, put the farm’s complete business address on the label and start the annual review record;
- get a product liability quote and ask what it costs to add a buyer as additionally insured;
- build a label with product name, farm name and address, pack date, and lot number, and start a lot numbering scheme you can actually trace back to a seeding date;
- write the one-page price sheet, including pack size, minimum order, and whether the price is FOB or delivered.
A chef who asks about your food safety paperwork and gets a complete answer in ten seconds will remember that longer than the flavor of the pea shoots. Seed, which is where most of the risk in this crop actually starts, is a separate question with its own gap in the chain, and we took it apart in whose job it is to test sprout seed. Food safety is also the ninth item in nine reasons microgreens businesses fail, because the growers most exposed to it are the ones the rules exempt.
