Must-Know Tips for Edible Flower Farming

Edible flowers are an excellent addition to your vegetable and microgreen farm. They’re fun and easy to grow, and their popularity continues to increase. Chefs, bartenders, and bakers demand edible flowers for their brightness, nutrient density, and versatility in adorning plates and drinks. 

Think of edible flowers as the eye-catching items on the grocery store's end caps for everyday consumers like your farmers’ market shoppers. It’s an easy up-sell item that will make their day and keep them coming back for more week after week. But don’t stop there. Keep reading to learn how to expand your markets, what popular edible flowers to offer, marketing tips, new trends, and best practices. 

Understanding the Market

According to the Edible Flowers Market Report in 2022, the edible flower industry was valued at nearly $318 million globally. Experts expect it to soar over the next 10 years, reaching an estimated $503 million by 2032. This is excellent news for current flower farmers and those interested in starting an edible flower farming business. 

Wholesale Opportunities 

You may think bartenders and chefs are the only professions demanding edible flowers, but the market now includes bakers, photographers, and holistic skincare producers, to name a few. 

Garnishing cupcakes with cornflowers adds a touch of beauty, but infusing vinegar and syrups with rose offers both flavor and potential health benefits. Trends show strong demand for fresh, dried, freeze-dried, and pressed flowers, commonly used to decorate simple wedding cakes, bake into scones, and infuse into salts and sugars. Flower farms can significantly increase their profitability when they widen their range of flowers, allowing them to market to different types of consumers.

Don’t limit yourself to selling only to local bars and bakeries; extend your reach to the incredible world of online selling. There is a considerable demand for edible flowers; if local producers aren’t growing what’s in demand, you can fill that void. Packaging experts have introduced eco-friendly container options and freezer packs that ensure flowers arrive to your customers safe and fresh. 

Choosing the Right Edible Flowers to Grow

While many flowers can be consumed, certain types and varieties perform better in the kitchen and have ideal flavors for cooking, baking, and garnishing. 

Types of Popular Edible Flowers

• Borage has a unique cucumber smell and flavor, perfect for salads and cocktails. It adds a nice pop of color to an otherwise neutral dish. 

• Butterfly Pea Flower is a vining perennial that produces a gorgeous violet flower. This flower is commonly used in natural dyeing but also has an interesting color-changing effect when mixed with citrus due to the change in pH. It’s fun to mix drinks with butterfly pea flower syrup and watch the customers’ reaction when they squeeze a lemon or lime into it.

• Buzz Buttons, also known as the toothache plant and electric daisy, have a strange, tingling, effervescent effect on the mouth and lips when consumed. Their flavor is citrusy and slightly bitter. The main ingredient, spilanthol, causes this effect.
  This perennial has been used medicinally for many years, and now chefs, mixologists, and bartenders are after the flowers. Its collagen-producing and anti-inflammatory properties make it ideal for cosmetics and skincare. 

• Calendula, or pot marigold, is tacky, so while it doesn’t work in all dishes, it’s an excellent addition to egg bakes, marinades, and olive oil blends. Its unique sweet, tangy flavor lends itself well to soups and stews and is often used instead of saffron. It is sometimes slightly bitter, so keep that in mind when blending flavors.
  Calendula is also commonly used as an anti-aging, anti-inflammatory, and moisturizing nutraceutical in skincare. Oncologists often recommend a cream made with calendula to relieve the burns from radiation in cancer treatment. 

• Cornflowers add a whimsical, summery vibe to any dish. Their subtle blueish-purple and pink tones and light petals make them ideal for garnish. Leave them whole or separate the petals and use them like confetti. Some say the flavor is similar to cloves. 

• Herb and allium blossoms have the flavor of their mother plant and add a surprising element to dishes. They also have an extended bloom window, a long shelf life, and interesting shapes, colors, and textures. 

• Lavender is an ever-popular sweet and floral herbaceous flower with a robust and concentrated aroma. It is best for simmering into syrups and candies, using it as dessert garnishes, baking it into bread, and adding it to poultry marinades. Read more about growing lavender in our article, Best Time to Plant Lavender: Seasonal Pros and Cons for Flower Farmers. 

• Nasturtiums are known for their beautiful, bright orange and yellow blooms, which look gorgeous atop a cake, alongside salmon cakes, or separated and tossed into a green salad. Both the flowers and petals are edible and have a distinct peppery flavor, and the plants are very low-maintenance. Bonus: You can pickle their seeds when green for a nifty caper-like treat! 

• Orange blossoms are slightly bitter, so eating them raw isn’t advised. Instead, you can distill them in water and infuse them into savory dishes or sweet desserts. 

• Pansies are cheerful “face” flowers with various petal types, colors, sizes, and a mildly sweet lettuce flavor. They’re extremely cold hardy, making it easy for them to grow outdoors without much effort. Garnish butternut squash soup with bright pansies for a unique flair. 

Not all of these thrive in every climate. While pansies grow exceptionally well in cold regions and are adaptable to various soil types, lavender has stricter heat, soil, and humidity requirements. Use your climate to your advantage; you can grow others indoors or in a hoop house! 

Related: Top 10 Edible Flowers to Grow

Assessing Growth Requirements

When selecting edible flowers to grow, consider the following:

• Do they grow well in your climate? This information is pertinent if you plan to grow them in the ground, especially in unprotected space. 

• Do your soil conditions match their needs? Some flowers, like pansies, are tolerant of various soil types but don’t do well in extreme heat, whereas lavender thrives in dry heat and sandy soil. 

• Do they fit into existing crop rotations? Consider proven companion planting to boost the benefits. For more information, check out our article, Boost Harvests With Companion Planting: Top Garden Pairings.

• Can you grow them indoors to extend your season? Remember, you can charge more for locally-produced items not typically found during the off-season. 

• Can you grow them hydroponically? Here are just a few flowers that perform well hydroponically:

• Gem marigolds 

• Nasturtium 

• Viola 

• Yarrow 

• Zinnias

• Herbs like fennel, dill, cilantro, and basil

Hydroponics is a fun way to grow crops quickly without the risk of soil-borne diseases or weeds. It’s a smart option for cold region growers with shorter outdoor growing seasons. Plus, the yields and quality increase when you can closely monitor crops growing right under your nose indoors without inclement weather, temperature fluctuations, and pest pressure. 

We recommend growing edible flowers using a nutrient film technique (NFT), deep water culture (DWC), ebb-and-flow system, or Dutch buckets. For more information on this subject, check out our article Hydroponic Edible Flowers: How to Grow Edible Flowers Without Soil. 

Incorporating Edible Flowers Alongside Microgreens

If you grow microgreens, you already have the infrastructure to grow edible flowers indoors year-round. Many require the same soil type, day length, and water, so adding them to the mix makes good business sense. 

Growing edible flowers alongside microgreens expands your offerings and widens your net of potential customers. Picture this: “Winter Microgreen Salad Mix + Edible Flowers.” Who wouldn’t want a locally-grown microgreen salad featuring bright and beautiful flowers? 

Planning for Profitability

Marketing is a massive part of increasing profitability because if people don’t know who you are, they can’t buy your product.

Marketing Tips 

Michelle of For the Good Microgreens, AZ suggests keeping it simple by posting beautiful photos on social media and sharing how you use the product with followers. Do you bake calendula petals into muffins? Are you freeze-drying buzz buttons and shipping them to an online supplier? Is a local bar garnishing cocktails with your borage petals or freezing pansies into ice cubes? People love to see products in real life and will appreciate learning something new from the person growing the flowers, so share often and honestly. 

When restaurants, bakeries, cake shops, and bars post a picture featuring your product, share and tag them, thanking them for your support. This co-branded marketing goes far and has worked well for our farm here in New Hampshire, where we sell edible flowers to several local bars in the summer. 

Market your fresh flowers as a high-quality, locally-grown product that will stay fresh longer than those ordered from a food service company. 

Determining Profitability

Things to consider: 

• Cost of seeds 
• Time to maturity 
• Grown indoors or outdoors
• Pest control 
• Do you need to sow consistently throughout the growing season, or will the plants continue producing? 
• What protection do you need to provide your plants? Include supplies like insect netting, mulching, fertilizer, etc. 

The cost of goods sold (COGS) combines the cost of labor (for that specific product) and materials used to create the finished product. Omit operating costs like utilities, marketing, office supplies, and distribution costs here, as you can only sometimes tie them to a specific product. A caveat to this rule is whether you grow indoors and can determine how much power and energy it takes to produce your product. When considering the COGS, you can compare it to the income received from the finished products and determine profitability. When looking at financial statements, remove COGS from a company’s revenue. The result is gross profit. The bottom line is that the lower your COGS, the more profit you see. 

Why are COGS important? Knowing the cost of doing business is the only way to determine if your profit margins are sufficient. Each company may have a different idea of profitability, affecting how much they feel comfortable spending on overhead costs and materials.  

Examples of COGS in an edible flower business: 

• Grow racks purchased specifically for growing flowers 

• Seeds 

• Seed-starting containers

• Soil or other growing media like a coco coir brick

• Raw materials like mulch and fertilizer 

• Anything related to manufacturing, except utilities 

COGS = Starting Inventory + Annual Purchases (Materials and Labor) - Ending Inventory 

Labor Cost = (Hourly Rate x Total Hours Worked) + Annual Costs (PTO, Insurance, Sick Days, etc.)

Labor Cost as a % of Sales = (Labor Cost / Sales) x 100

Example: Your part-time employee makes $25,000 a year in hourly wages. You offer a $250 professional development stipend and two paid sick days equalling $250. So, your employee costs you $25,500 annually. 

Your annual sales are $80,000. ($25,500 / $80,000) x 100 = roughly 32%. So your labor costs are 32% of your sales. 

As your business grows, consider ways to cut COGS to improve your profitability. Michelle chimed in on this as well. She stated that in her first year selling edible flowers, she determined how many flowers each buzz button plant produced in a month, which she shipped to a customer in the Midwest. Each time flowers were shipped, Michelle improved her packaging to be more efficient. Now, she feels confident that she can market this as a service she can offer in the future to expand her business and increase her profits. 

Like vegetables, fruit, cut flowers, or herbs, grow what you can produce a lot of inexpensively and without much stress, and you’ll be profitable. Paying attention to your bottom line is crucial.  

FAQ

Can I grow edible flowers alongside microgreens?

Yes, you can grow them side-by-side. Growers in cold regions often extend their season by growing microgreens indoors, and they can do the same with edible flowers. Use Bootstrap Farmer’s Automated Grow Rack and well-draining containers such as 5" pots or 5x5 deep trays.

What is the best way to market edible flowers?

The beauty of edible flowers naturally makes them easy to market. Select packaging that effectively displays them without crushing the petals. Offer your customers a range of colors, sizes, textures, and flavors, and know your stuff. Research the benefits of consuming each flower type you offer so you can speak to them. 

Take many photos and use them freely on your social media, website, newsletters, and printed media. Focus on the many ways customers can use them to show their versatility. 

How do you package edible flowers?

Clamshells are the most common and effective way to package edible flowers. They come in various sizes and shapes, so you can choose something that works best for your lineup. Clear packaging is recommended so customers can see inside at a glance. Play around with different options and ask companies you’re considering if they offer samples so you can try a few out before purchasing a bunch. The most significant choice you’ll have to make is between a flat top clamshell and one that provides space above the fill line. 

If your flowers don’t have far to travel, a 1-mil, 16-inch tall microgreen bag is an alternative to clamshells. Twist it from the bottom to trap air, then twist-tie it shut. Packing them this way prevents them from being squished, and bags are less expensive than clamshells. 

What are the tastiest edible flowers? 

Nasturtium, calendula, borage, and pansies are the tastiest edible flowers. Zinnias, snapdragons, and dianthus are often included in bright summery mixes but are used more for color than flavor. Read Top 10 Edible Flowers To Grow for our favorites and Bootstrap Farmer’s Edible Flower List for the A to Z of edible flowers. 

Written by Jenna Rich of Partners’ Gardens LLC. , Photos by Lisa Knoebel Photography