Cilantro microgreens, and the panel that put them top of twelve
Fifty-four people rated twelve species side by side and coriander took the joint highest score, and the best looking tray of the lot. The half nobody mentions is that the same crop finished twenty-first of twenty-five for vitamin C.
Cilantro is the microgreen your customer already has an opinion about, and the opinion mostly runs your way. When 54 people rated twelve species side by side, coriander took the joint highest score for eating quality and the highest appearance rating of the lot. It also finished first of twenty-five microgreens for lutein and zeaxanthin. What it is not is a vitamin C crop, and the one trial that grew the seedling and the grown leaf from the same seed found about four times as much in the grown leaf.
That is the whole pitch. The last sentence is not a weakness in it. Saying it out loud is what makes the rest believable.
What the research measured
Figures below are from published work on coriander microgreens specifically, not on microgreens as a category. Where a comparison with the grown plant appears, a study actually made it. Coriander is one of the few crops where that comparison is allowed at all, because the seedling and the mature herb are the same organ. Both are leaves.
Every row is tied to a numbered source, and the numbered list is in the guide and in the research post linked below. No figure appears here without one.
Conditions. The flavour scores are a 54 person consumer panel at the University of Naples, rated on a 0 to 15 scale where the acceptability items run from bad to excellent and the intensity items run from not perceived to perceived very well, peat moss under high pressure sodium at 420 µmol, cut at the first pair of true leaves. That paper’s cultivar sits in a supplementary table we could not retrieve, so it is not named here. The pigment and vitamin C figures come from a survey of twenty-five microgreens bought from one commercial grower near San Diego between May and July 2011, soil grown in an unheated greenhouse under ambient light, with no cultivar, no temperature and no harvest age stated. Dry matter is cv. ‘Micro Splits’ from CN Seeds, across five substrates under LED at 300 µmol, cut at the second true leaf near Naples. The stage comparison is unnamed seed in vermicompost enriched soil under ambient light in Chennai, cut at seven to eight days against grown leaves at sixty. Saying which is part of the figure.
What this does not show
There is no published human trial on eating coriander microgreens, and no published shelf life study either.
Nobody has run either one. Everything measured above is what sits in the plant, not what it does in a body, and the same limit runs backwards to every ancient use of the fruit and the grown leaf. A seedling cut at two to three weeks is a different part of the plant at a different stage, and even the research on why some people taste soap was done entirely on the grown herb.
Composition moves with the growing system, and for this crop it moves further than for anything else in the library. Two experiments in the same laboratory, on the same inert matting, with seed from the same supplier, measured coriander nitrate at 18.5 and at 1,003 milligrams per kilogram. What differed was photoperiod, day temperature and two days of growth. That is why no mineral figure appears in the table above. The full accounting, including where coriander ranks last, is in the guide.
What your customer will ask
The part you cannot get from a nutrition database. Six questions that come up at a stall or a restaurant door, what you can say, and what you must not. The fifth one is particular to this crop and it is the one growers get wrong most often.
1“Why is it so expensive for such a small thing?”
Built on the hand work, the slow germination, and the one number a customer can picture.
Anything that measures the price against medicine, supplements, or a health outcome. Price is about labour, not about what the food is supposed to do for somebody.
2“What is it actually good for?”
Built on the twenty-five species ranking, and on the honest half of it.
Never say it treats, prevents, cures, or helps with any condition. That sentence is the line between a food and a drug, and it is the same line in the United States, the United Kingdom and South Africa. Do not carry anything across from the paper titled for anticarcinogenic and antidiabetic potential either. Nobody in that study ate anything. It was an enzyme in a tube and cancer cells in a dish, with no healthy cells tested alongside them.
3“How do I use it? It will just go off in my fridge.”
Built on the flavour scores, and on what to do when there is no shelf life figure to borrow.
A shelf life you have not tested yourself, in your own packaging, in the fridge your customer actually owns. For this crop you cannot even borrow somebody else’s number. No shelf life study of coriander microgreens has been published.
4“Is it safe? I read something about sprouts.”
Built on how the growing differs from sprouts, and on what you can honestly promise about your own.
Never say your product cannot be contaminated. Say what you do, not what is impossible. And do not quote nitrate limits at people. Those numbers were written for field and glasshouse crops, and no limit is set for microgreens at all. For coriander that is worth knowing twice over, because two trials in the same laboratory measured its nitrate fifty-four fold apart.
“My husband says cilantro tastes like soap. Is that a real thing?”
It is real, and it is much smaller than people think. A study of about 26,000 people found a difference near a cluster of smell genes in the ones who say cilantro tastes soapy12. It explains about half of one percent of who does and who does not. So it is not a switch somebody is born with, it is a nudge. Two other things worth telling him. That work was all done on the grown herb, not on these, and nobody has tested whether it holds at the seedling stage. And about thirteen in a hundred people of European background report it at all13, so he has company, and the rest of the table is fine.
Never tell somebody they will grow out of it, or that the seedling will not taste soapy to them. Nobody has tested that. And do not hand them the genetics as destiny. The variant explains a sliver of the difference, one study has never been replicated outside its own cohort, and a separate twin study found different genes entirely15.
6“Somebody told me these have way more nutrition than the herb. How much more?”
Built on where the famous number came from, and why it is not an experiment.
Never repeat a multiplier you have not traced to a table. The one in circulation for this crop sets an instrument reading on bought seedlings against a database entry for the grown herb. Different growers, seasons, regions, laboratories and methods, and no experiment anywhere inside it. If you cannot name the study, the crop and the weight basis, do not say the number.
Figures on this page describe what has been measured in the plant. Nothing here is a claim that any food treats, prevents, eases or cures any condition. This information is educational and is not a substitute for professional medical advice.
Everything above, in a form you can hand across
The customer who thinks seven dollars is mad for a punnet of herb seedlings is not asking for a lecture. They want one page they can hold, read on the walk back to the car, and still have on the fridge on Thursday. That page is the guide.
Every figure is traced to a table in the source paper. Not an abstract, not a summary, the table. Find one that is not and I will correct it and reissue the guide.
When the research moves, you get the new version. That is the part a flyer you write yourself cannot do. Yours goes out of date the day you print it. This one does not.
Editable Word document, a fillable PDF, and three print-ready sheets. Ten minutes from download to handing the first one across.
- Print it, hand it to customers, and put it on your own table, for as long as you sell
- Change the farm name, the contact line and the logo, on every file in the package
- Leave the health language, the disclaimers and the citations exactly as written. That is the core term, and it is the part that protects you
- One farm, one license. It does not transfer with a sale of the files and it is not for resale
Just eating them, not selling? Personal edition, $7
The same three sheets, Microgreens World branded. Read them, print them, keep them on the fridge. No right to put them in front of customers.
Every figure on this page rests on one of 15 peer-reviewed sources, 1976 to 2023. The full list, with journals and direct links, is in the guide and in the research post linked below.
Superscript markers through this page show which claim rests on which source. The full reference list is in the guide and in the research post linked below.
