RESTAURANT SUPPLY · FOR BUYERS AND GROWERS
Microgreen Software for Restaurants: Both Sides of the Delivery.
A chef does not lose sleep over how the pea shoots were grown. A chef loses sleep over whether the box lands on Thursday, whether it matches what was ordered, and whether anybody will say something before service if it does not. This page is written for both people in that relationship: the buyer who wants to stop guessing, and the grower who wants to be the supplier nobody replaces.
The Tuesday that ends the account
Here is the failure, in order, because it always happens in the same order.
A grower lands a restaurant. Four clamshells of pea shoots and two of radish, every Thursday. It goes well for eleven weeks. In week twelve a radish tray damps off in the blackout phase and nobody notices, because the tray is under a cover in the corner and the grower is looking at the sunflower. On Thursday morning the grower pulls the radish and finds half a tray of usable product.
The call happens at 3:40pm. The kitchen has already prepped for a dish that plates with radish. The chef is polite. The chef also, that evening, texts another grower.
Nothing in that story is a growing failure. Trays fail. Every farm loses trays. The failure was that the tray and the order were living in two different places, so a problem that was visible on day three did not surface until day eight, when there was no time left to sow a replacement.
What the chef is actually buying
Ask a chef why they stayed with a produce supplier for six years and you will not hear anything about flavor. You will hear a version of: they have never let me down.
Microgreens amplify that, because they are grown to order rather than pulled from stock. Nobody has a walk-in full of spare pea shoots. Pea takes roughly 10 days, radish about 8, sunflower about 10. So a Thursday delivery was decided the previous week, and by the time anyone notices a gap the window to fix it has closed.
Which means the product a restaurant is buying from a microgreen grower is not really the greens. It is the grower's schedule discipline. The greens are the receipt.
Our old guy was cheaper and the product was fine. He also texted me at four in the afternoon about twice a month to tell me what he did not have. I do not need cheap. I need to know what is in the box before I write the specials board.
Chef and owner, 60-seat restaurant, southeast PA
For the chef: four questions before you sign on
You do not need to inspect anybody's grow room. You need to find out whether this grower is running a system or running on memory. These four questions do that in under five minutes, and the useful part is not the answer, it is how fast it comes.
- What is your delivery day, and what is the cut-off for changing an order? A grower with a real schedule answers instantly and gives you a cut-off in days, not hours, because sowing happens a week ahead. A grower who says "just text me whenever" is telling you they have no succession plan, which is the same thing as telling you they will be short eventually.
- When a crop fails, do I hear from you before service or after? Ask it plainly. Then ask the follow-up that actually matters: how far ahead do you know? If the honest answer is "harvest morning", you are the shock absorber for their growing problems.
- How many trays a week can you hold for me on your worst week, not your best? Capacity quoted from a good week is how a supplier ends up choosing between you and their other account in August.
- How do you invoice, and on what terms? If invoices arrive weeks late and in inconsistent formats, your accounts payable cycle will absorb the cost, and the relationship will develop friction that has nothing to do with the greens.
One more, worth asking yourself rather than the grower: what would it actually cost you if the box did not arrive next Thursday? Menu reprint, a dish pulled, a server explaining it forty times. Price that honestly and the cheapest supplier stops looking cheapest.
What you should never have to do
You should not have to log into anything. Any supplier who asks a kitchen to adopt a portal has moved their admin into the busiest room in the building. The kitchen already has a system: the order sheet, the walk-in, the prep list. Good supplier software is invisible to you and shows up as three things only. A confirmation the morning of the drop. A heads-up before service if something changed. An invoice that matches the box.
For the grower: what has to be in place
Concede the obvious first. If you supply one restaurant, you do not need software for this. You need a phone and a calendar, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. The question is when that stops being true, and the honest answer is: at about three restaurant accounts, or the first time two deliveries land on the same day.
1. The order has to be connected to the tray
This is the whole thing. Not "we have an orders screen" and separately "we have a tray tracker". The Thursday order for 4 clamshells of pea has to know which trays are meant to fill it, so that a tray flagged as struggling on day three raises a commercial problem, not just a growing one.
When that link exists, the week-twelve story above happens differently. The radish is flagged on Tuesday of the previous week. There is time to sow a second tray, or time to call the chef on Tuesday instead of Thursday, which is a conversation about a substitution rather than an apology about a gap.
2. Standing orders that repeat without being re-entered
A recurring order is not a convenience feature. It is the mechanism that turns a promise into a sow schedule. Set 4 pea and 2 radish every Thursday once, and every week the sow dates are derived from it rather than reconstructed on Sunday night from memory and a text thread.
3. A named substitute per variety, agreed in advance
This one costs nothing and saves accounts. Sit down with the chef once and agree the fallback for each line. Radish short, amaranth goes in at the same price. Pea short, sunflower at the same weight. Now a bad week produces a two-line text on Tuesday rather than a negotiation on Thursday afternoon.
4. The invoice goes out the day you deliver
Restaurants pay on cycles. An invoice that arrives three weeks late does not get paid late, it gets paid a whole cycle late, and you have financed someone else's kitchen for a month without agreeing to. Same-day, itemized to match the box, terms on the document.
5. Somebody else has to be able to run the drop
The day you are ill is the day the route matters most. If the delivery list lives in your head, there is no day off in this business. If it lives in a shared system with the addresses, the quantities and the standing notes, someone else can drive it.
The four failures, and what fixes each
Every lost restaurant account we have watched traces to one of these. None of them are growing problems.
| What the chef experiences | What actually happened | The fix |
|---|---|---|
| Short delivery, told the same day | A tray failed days earlier and nothing connected it to the order it was promised to | Link orders to plantings so a struggling tray flags the order it fills |
| Order drifted from what was agreed | The standing order lived in a text thread and got amended verbally three times | A recurring order record that both sides can read back |
| Delivery arrived mid-service | No fixed window, route driven in whatever order made sense that morning | Fixed delivery day and window per client, planned as a route |
| Invoices late, inconsistent, or wrong | Invoices re-typed by hand days later from a delivery note | Invoice generated from the delivered order and synced to accounting |
Where Grown Like A Pro fits, and where it does not
Plainly, because a vague answer here helps nobody.
The restaurant does not use it. There is no chef login and no portal to adopt. The kitchen sees texts, emails and invoices.
The tools a grower needs for restaurant accounts start on the Grower plan at $12.99 a month. That covers 50 clients, 200 orders a month, 200 active trays, recurring orders, client email and SMS with open rates, professional invoicing, QuickBooks Online sync, 2 team members, and Bluetooth temperature and humidity sensors for the grow room. Client records and orders are genuinely not available on the Free or Solo plans. Solo at $3.00 a month is a growing app, not a selling app, and we would rather say that here than let you find out after paying.
Pro at $19.99 a month removes the client, order and tray caps, adds multi-farm management, harvest forecasting and GPS delivery route optimization, and raises the team seats to 10. Route optimization is the one that changes a delivery day: it orders the drops instead of you doing it from memory at 6am.
Two honest limits. Grown Like A Pro ships a native Android app on Google Play plus the web app at app.grownlikeapro.com. There is no iOS app yet, it is in App Store review, and on an iPhone today what you get is the web app. And Glappy, the in-app AI assistant, is capped by plan: 10 questions a day on Solo, 30 on Grower, 100 on Pro. It is not unlimited on any plan.
Start free, 8 trays, no card →Frequently asked questions
What is microgreen software for restaurants?
It is farm management software used by the grower, not by the restaurant. The restaurant never logs in. What the restaurant sees is the output: a standing order that repeats without being re-asked, a delivery on the agreed day, a substitution warning before service rather than after, and an invoice that matches the box. In Grown Like A Pro that means client records, recurring orders, delivery scheduling, invoicing and QuickBooks Online sync, which start on the Grower plan at $12.99 a month.
What should a chef ask a microgreen supplier before signing on?
Four questions. One, what is your fixed delivery day and cut-off time for changing an order. Two, what happens when a crop fails, do I hear from you before service or after. Three, how many trays a week can you actually hold for me, not at your best week but at your worst. Four, how do you invoice and on what terms. A grower who can answer all four from a system rather than from memory is the grower whose Thursday box shows up in month nine.
How do standing orders work for microgreens?
A standing order is a recurring quantity on a fixed day: for example 4 clamshells of pea shoots and 2 of radish every Thursday. The grower works backward from that date to a sow date, because microgreens are grown to order rather than picked from stock. Pea shoots need roughly 10 days, radish about 8, sunflower about 10, so the Thursday delivery is decided the previous week. Software matters here because it turns the standing order into the sow schedule automatically instead of the grower recalculating it every Sunday night.
Why do microgreen suppliers miss deliveries?
Rarely because the grower forgot the restaurant. Usually because the tray that was meant for that restaurant failed, and nothing connected the failed tray back to the order it was promised to. The grower finds out on harvest morning that the radish is short, with no time left to sow more. The fix is linking orders to plantings so a failed tray raises a flag days early, while there is still time to sow a replacement or call the chef.
How many restaurants can one microgreen grower supply?
It depends on rack space rather than admin, up to a point. A rough guide from working farms: a restaurant using microgreens as a plating garnish takes 2 to 6 clamshells a week, which is roughly one to two 10 by 20 trays. So 200 active trays supports a meaningful multi-restaurant route once succession timing is accounted for. Grown Like A Pro's Grower plan covers 200 active trays, 50 clients and 200 orders a month at $12.99. Pro removes the tray, client and order caps at $19.99 and adds GPS delivery route optimization.
Do restaurants need their own microgreen app?
No, and any supplier who asks a kitchen to adopt a portal is adding work to the busiest room in the building. The kitchen already has a system: the order sheet, the walk-in, the prep list. What the chef wants from software is that it never appears. A confirmation text the morning of the drop, an invoice that matches the box, and a warning before service if something changed. That is the whole interface.
What should a microgreen grower have in place before approaching restaurants?
Consistent supply first. A chef will forgive a higher price and will not forgive a gap. Before the first sales call, run the variety on a repeating succession for four weeks and confirm you can hit the same weight on the same day four times running. Then get the paperwork side settled: a client record with what they order, a repeating order tied to a delivery day, and an invoice you can send the same day you deliver. Approaching a kitchen before you can do that is how growers lose an account in month two.
How should a microgreen grower invoice a restaurant?
Same day as the delivery, itemized to match the box, with terms stated on the document. Restaurants pay on cycles, and an invoice that arrives three weeks late lands in the next cycle rather than this one. Grown Like A Pro generates the invoice from the order that was actually delivered and syncs it to QuickBooks Online, which removes the step where a grower re-types the same six lines into an accounting app. That is on the Grower plan at $12.99 a month.
What happens when a crop fails the week a restaurant is expecting it?
You call before service, not after. Chefs plan menus around what they are told is coming, so the damage from a substitution announced on Tuesday is small and the damage from a gap discovered at 4pm Thursday is large. Operationally, that means you need to know a tray is failing several days before harvest day, which is what stage tracking and photo diagnosis are for. Have a named substitute per variety agreed with the chef in advance, so the call is "radish is short, I am bringing you amaranth at the same price" rather than an apology.
The bottom line
Restaurant supply is a promise business. The greens are the easy part. What holds an account for six years is that the grower knows on Tuesday what Thursday looks like, and says so.
If you are the chef, ask the four questions and listen to how fast the answers come. If you are the grower, connect your orders to your trays before you sign the third account, because the third account is where memory stops working.