Our September 21 sweep of Ukrainian supermarket listings puts the median retail price of microgreens at $10.11 a pound. The cheapest item on the shelf runs $4.60 a pound and the most expensive $24.49, a spread of 5.3 times. Both ends belong to the same chain, in the same city, on the same day.
Where the numbers come from
The data is our own. Green Index pulls prices from the online storefronts of Ukrainian grocery chains and normalizes each one to price per 100 grams using the pack weight. As of September 23 the database holds 310 products across 14 cities, last refreshed September 21.
The microgreens category holds 49 listings, 45 of which carry a pack weight and can be normalized. The fresh September 21 sweep produced 27 of those across ten chains, in three cities: Kyiv with 13 listings, Kharkiv with 11, Odesa with 3. Every item was in stock. Dollar figures use the National Bank rate of 44.8571 hryvnia per dollar for September 24, 2026.
What the September sweep shows
Minimum $4.60 a pound, median $10.11, mean $9.84, maximum $24.49. The standard deviation runs close to half the mean, so the average is usable with care: the upper tail is long.
Week over week the category is flat. The index summary reads 109.6 hryvnia per 100 grams against 109.9 seven days earlier. Potted lettuce and salad mixes are flat too.
Pack size drives the spread, not the crop
Sort the sweep by pack weight and the pattern falls into a straight line with no exceptions.
| Pack | Listings | Median $ per pound |
|---|---|---|
| 45 g, 1.6 oz | 1 | 24.49 |
| 50 g, 1.8 oz | 18 | 10.68 |
| 70 g, 2.5 oz | 3 | 7.65 |
| 90 g, 3.2 oz | 2 | 6.23 |
| 200 g, 7.1 oz | 3 | 4.60 |
From a 1.6 ounce clamshell to a 7 ounce one, the price of the same pound of product falls 5.3 times, and the sequence never breaks. Both extremes sit in one retailer. On September 21 the chain WineTime in Kyiv sold pea microgreens in a 200 gram pack for 91 hryvnia, which is $4.60 a pound, and a 45 gram mix for 109 hryvnia, which is $24.49 a pound. One storefront, one day, a 5.3-fold gap.
Within a single pack size the spread is smaller. Among the eighteen 50 gram listings, price per pound runs from $6.65 to $16.38, a factor of 2.46. Pack weight moves the shelf price about twice as hard as brand, crop, chain and city combined.
The takeaway for a grower is direct. The 50 gram clamshell, just under two ounces, is the de facto shelf standard, eighteen listings out of twenty-seven. Anyone who packs seven ounces lands in the bottom price band automatically, whatever the quality of the product.
Ukrainian retail sits below the American farm gate
The Census of Horticultural Specialties reports a median of $11.43 a pound for microgreens across the group of states whose figures survived our checks. Ukrainian shelf median is $10.11.
The comparison needs a correction, and the correction is the whole point. The American number is what the operation receives: 89.2 percent of census sales move wholesale. The Ukrainian number is the final shelf, chain markup included. So a Ukrainian retail display prices 11.5 percent under what an American grower collects before the product reaches a store at all.
For a Ukrainian grower selling into chains, that means the wholesale price sits well under $10 a pound, and how far under cannot be read from this data. Chains do not publish their markup, and no open source closes that gap.
What does not reconcile
Three things worth stating plainly.
- The index summary endpoint reports 109.6 hryvnia per 100 grams, while counting the rows directly gives 104.2 across all 45 listings and 97.3 across the fresh sweep. Nothing we tried reproduced 109.6 from the rows, so this article uses the row-level figures.
- The database holds two sweeps, August 31 and September 21. The August one medians 20 percent higher, and mixing them lifts the level. All eighteen August rows also have an empty city field, and all eighteen belong to a single chain, which is absent from the September sweep entirely.
- Four listings out of 49 carry no pack weight, so they never entered the per-pound math.
Three cities out of fourteen is a limit of its own. Outside Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odesa the chains carry no microgreens online, and that absence is itself a data point: in most regional capitals the category does not exist on the shelf.
The previous index report ran in April. The next sweep will show whether the September level holds, or whether the August median was a seasonal peak rather than ordinary small-sample noise.
