Products and Microgreens Crop Planning

One of the most complex aspects of crop planning is the product. A product is closely related to a crop but there is a clear distinction we need to make:

• You grow a crop
• You sell a product

Even when the crop gets sold as is (e.g., live tray) it is a crop while it is growing and only becomes a product when it is prepared for sale (e.g., removed from the growing area).

So, what is a product? A product is the unit you offer and sell to the customer. SeedLeaf break products down into two components:

1. Product Groups (e.g., sunflower products, spicy mix products), of which there are two types:
   1. Single-Crop Product Groups
   2. Multiple-Crop Products Groups (Blends)
2. Product Variants (i.e., size or sales unit – including live trays)

Each product group can have multiple variants (sizes or sales units) and SeedLeaf allows for both live and cut (packaged) products.

Both single crop and multi-crop products have five basic elements:

1. Product Name
2. Product Crop(s)
3. Product Sizes
4. Product Weights
5. Product Prices

Blends have one additional element:

1. Product proportions in the mix

Single-Crop Products

Let’s start by looking at single crop products as an example, continuing to use sunflower as an example.

Single crop products are quite self-explanatory – a product containing a single crop. To create a single crop product:

Step 1: Create a new product and name it “Sunflower”. You can also use a more fancy name or your marketing name as your product name (e.g., Super Sunnies). Do what makes the most sense for you and your operation.

Step 2: Choose a crop, in this case, sunflower. 

• Note: You can only select crops that are in your crop list. So if you want to make a sunflower product, be sure you have a sunflower crop!

Step 3: Choose whether the variant will be cut (packaged, with an assigned size) or live (sold live in tray)

Step 3: Add a variant of the product. SeedLeaf allows for 4 variants:

1. Small (S)
2. Medium (M)
3. Large (L)
4. Tray (automatic if “live” selected in previous step)

Step 4: Add a weight (in g or oz) to correspond to your variant.

• Weight does not apply to live trays so the field is not displayed

Step 5: Add a price for your variant

Step 6: Repeat for each product variant you want to add, up to 4 variants.

Step 7: save

Entering a product group in SeedLeaf only needs to be done once and takes about one minute. Product groups can be edited at any time.

So here is what your sunflower product group might look like:

• Name: Sunflower 
• Sizes and prices:
  • Small – 125g, $5.00
  • Medium – 225g, $8.00
  • Large – 450g, $15.00
  • Trays – $15.00

Blended-Crop Products

Creating a blended-crop product is the same as creating a single-crop product, with one additional step” assigning proportions to each crop.

• Note: you cannot do blends of live trays. If you have a “crop blend” (e.g., radish and broccoli growing in the same tray) – this would be considered a single crop and therefore a single crop product.

Step 1:  Name your blended product

Step 2: Choose your first crop

Step 3: Click “Add blend” to choose the proportion of that crop in your mix

• When you do this, the field for the next crop in the blend will appear

Step 4: Select as many crops and their proportions you want in your blend

• Note: your proportions must total to 100%! 

Step 5: Choose your sizes, weights, and prices as above.

SeedLeaf is particularly powerful when it comes to blends as it will automatically calculate how much of each crop is needed to meet your product needs

Product Hacks – Retail and Wholesale!

The retail/wholesale pricing feature in SeedLeaf is still to come and will be a premium feature. But, there’s a hack for that!

For any of the product groups you create above, you can simple create an exact duplicate, but change the prices. Then change the name of both products groups, like so:

• “Sunflower – Retail”
• “Sunflower – Wholesale”

Then when you go to make an order you can select the variants with the pricing you want.

You can also use this hack if you have different packaging needs for different types of packaging for different customers. It can be broad:

• “Sunflower – Blue Packaging”
• “Sunflower – Green Packaging”

Or it can be specific per customer:

• “Sunflower – Jane’s Cafe”

This gives you a lot of control over different packaging needs. While we frame this as a hack, beta testing to date suggests this might actually be the best way to manage different pricing and packaging options. Combined with custom crops, this gives you a huge range of options for crop and product customization. 

So that is an overview of products. Next we’ll get into placing orders.