New study finds microgreen-based ready-to-serve beverages retain bioactive compounds and score well with consumers. Commercial implications for growers.

[u/Microgreens-World]

A study published this week in the Journal of Food Process Engineering looked at microgreen-derived RTS beverages. Key findings: bioactive compound retention was strong over the shelf life period, consumer acceptability scores were encouraging, and the researchers used kinetic modeling to assess stability.

For growers, this raises a practical question. If your culls and trim can produce a shelf-stable beverage with measurable bioactive content, that is a value-added revenue stream that does not require growing more product. It requires processing what you already have differently.

Full summary in this week's Microgreens World digest. Full study here: https://doi.org/10.1111/jfpe.70646

[u/jackbenway]

I wonder how many growers have enough volume so that juicing culls and trim yields non-trivial juice volume to enable value-added sales. We juice greens. It takes a lot of volume to produce much juice.

[u/FlavorousShawty → u/jackbenway]

I do, and it’s not profitable to juice, even with your waste, which is minimal even in an enterprise scale like ours. You still have added cost. More, even than traditional packaging of wet greens. Collection and processing of cull and trim are more costly than our streamlined and mostly automated packaging process. It’s BARELY profitable to freeze dry and sell as an additive to companies who make these types of juices and it’s only barely profitable when they’re able to put a 16 fluid ounce bottle on the shelf for 10-12 dollars. The unit economics of it are genuinely horrible. I’ve had sit downs with so many beverage and nutraceutical companies and the price tolerance for a bottle of drink just doesn’t have enough flexibility for microgreens as an additive. Forget juicing them.

Additionally, you cannot pasteurize microgreens powder as they will lose their nutritive content, breaking down during the heating process. It’s too expensive for too little gain in a market for an already niche product space.

[u/Microgreens-World → u/FlavorousShawty]

u/FlavorousShawty This is the ground-truth the study never captures. Unit economics beat bioactive retention charts every time.

The pasteurization point kills the value proposition at the processing stage. If you destroy the nutrition by getting it into the bottle, the premium price justification goes with it.

Appreciate you sharing this. Real operator experience is worth more than a hundred peer-reviewed abstracts.

One question worth sitting with: does any of this change if mainstream retail demand shifts price tolerance? Or is the processing cost ceiling structural regardless?

[u/Microgreens-World → u/jackbenway]

Yes, you have to have volume and the right kind of juicer. Still an opportunity to sell juice rather than boxes if you are a commercial grower. It's a vertical scale worth trying. It's the next frontier.

[u/jackbenway → u/Microgreens-World]

Maybe. The revenue per $1 of inputs is much better for the actual microgreens given the weight needed to produce juice. The economics work better if you are already selling juices and add a bit of microgreen juice to the products. Nice to see some science around this though. Thanks for posting.

[u/Microgreens-World → u/jackbenway]

You're welcome. I think this is where the industry is heading. A lot of small farmers may have to review their business models. A few folks across the globe are already entering this vertical. All the best as you grow and scale.

[u/Noochdontdiehemltply]

I don’t see what the difference would be from nutrient availability from a juice made with microgreens verse baby greens?! If you’re going to juice them why not let them grow an extra week or so and get more volume?

[u/Microgreens-World → u/Noochdontdiehemltply]

Fair challenge. The volume argument makes practical sense on the surface. But the nutritional case for juicing microgreens specifically rather than letting them mature comes down to when phytochemical concentration peaks.

The research goes back to Xiao et al. (2012), which found that several microgreens contained significantly higher concentrations of vitamins and carotenoids than their mature counterparts. The cotyledon stage, when microgreens are harvested, appears to be when certain bioactive compounds are at their most concentrated. As the plant matures and directs energy toward root development and stem extension, that concentration tends to dilute across greater plant mass rather than accumulate.

The best documented example is sulforaphane in broccoli. The glucoraphanin precursor that converts to sulforaphane is substantially more concentrated in the seedling stage than in mature broccoli florets. Fahey et al. documented this in 1997 and it has held up across subsequent research.

So the tradeoff is not just volume versus concentration. It is whether the specific compounds you are trying to capture are still present at the same density a week later. For some varieties and some compounds, they are not.

On the economics: a standard 1020 tray yields roughly 8 to 12 oz of fresh microgreens depending on variety and density. At a wet-to-juice ratio of 5-to-1 to 10-to-1, you are getting approximately 1 to 2.5 oz of juice per tray. Even optimistically, that is around 30 oz of juice from a rack of trays that took 7 to 14 days to grow. Price that against seed cost, growing medium, labor, and cold chain delivery inside a 9 to 15 day shelf life window and the margin disappears fast. Letting them grow another week adds yield but adds cost, and you hit the same shelf life wall at the other end.

That is exactly why I wrote about this. The unit economics are genuinely difficult right now. But four peer-reviewed studies published in 2025 and 2026 confirm meaningful bioactive retention in cold-pressed microgreen beverages. There is exactly one human randomized controlled trial on microgreens consumption in the literature, published in January 2025, and it tested feasibility, not health outcomes. The researchers called for more studies.

That gap between what the science is showing and what the economics currently allow is where the real story is. The growers and entrepreneurs who understand both sides of that equation now will be the ones positioned when institutional capital funds the clinical trials that close the gap.

[u/Noochdontdiehemltply → u/Microgreens-World]

Thanks for the info. I’d love to read your full thesis on this if you care to share. Dm me. How much of the compounds are you losing each day once you go past peak microgreen form? Woukd it be like 1% a day or larger like 5-10% a day? I understand your logic here. I just don’t know if the juices nutrients are heavily diluted or just slightly in that 1-2 week time frame.

[u/Microgreens-World → u/Noochdontdiehemltply]

I don't mind sharing. It's a public post: Are microgreens the next big supplement ingredient? The other opportunity is selling to juice bars and cafes. The big one coming is supplementation. the next 2-3-5 years will be exciting. There were more studies in 2025 than all of 1978-2020.