The Microgreens Cooperative

You have the idea and the energy. What you do not have is the money for a first investment. So we removed that part: our growing space is offered free to young entrepreneurs who want to build a microgreens business.

Learn the business first

The problem we are solving

Ask a young person in Greece why they never started the business they talk about, and the answer is almost never “I did not have the idea.” It is the first few thousand euros. Rent on a production space. Racks, trays, lights. A first order of seed. Packaging. The months of costs before the first customer pays you.

That gap is where most young entrepreneurship in food quietly dies — not from lack of ability, but from lack of a starting point. Meanwhile, microgreens are one of the very few food products that need almost no space, no land and no machinery to produce commercially.

So the logic of the cooperative is simple: we already have the growing space. If we open it to young people for free, the barrier disappears — and what is left is the part that actually matters, which is whether you can build something and sell it.

What you get

Growing space, free

Room in our production space to grow your crop — the single biggest fixed cost of a microgreens business, removed. You are not renting it and you are not paying it back.

Knowledge and mentoring

Everything we know about growing, food safety, pricing and selling — plus people who have already made the mistakes, so you can skip a few of them.

Your own brand

You do not grow under our label. You build your brand, and we host it here on the portal so it reaches an audience from day one.

A community, not a desk

You work alongside other young growers, our team, interns and European volunteers. Shared problems, shared solutions, shared customers.

A route to market

Our own microgreens brand and our existing channels help open the first doors — the hardest ones — for the brands growing inside the hub.

European opportunities

The organisation behind the methodology, EVEC Athens (evec.org.gr), is active in Erasmus+ and European youth work and can connect you to training, mobility and partners across Europe.

What we ask from you

Nothing financial. But this is a cooperative, not a free warehouse, and it only works if everyone in it carries their share:

Show up. Microgreens are a living crop on a weekly rhythm. A tray does not wait for your motivation to return.
Respect the food. You will be producing food eaten raw by other people. Our hygiene and safety standards are not negotiable.
Give back to the commons. Share what you learn — with the next entrepreneur, with a school group, with this portal.
Actually try to build a business. We are not looking for perfect plans. We are looking for people who will genuinely attempt it.

Who this is for

Young people who want to start a business and do not have the capital to do it. You do not need a degree, a business plan, growing experience, or a finished idea. If you have never grown a microgreen in your life, start on our Grow at Home pages and come back — that is a completely normal route in.

We particularly want to hear from people who are usually locked out of entrepreneurship: young people who are unemployed, without family money behind them, from migrant backgrounds, or from communities where “start a business” has never sounded like a realistic sentence.

The brand hub

Every business that grows out of the cooperative gets its own home on this portal: its story, its products, and where to find it. Alongside them sits our own microgreens brand, whose purpose is to prove the model works and to help fund the free space for the next entrepreneur.

The first brands are being built now. This is where they will appear.

Interested?

We are opening the cooperative to its first entrepreneurs. Tell us who you are and what you want to build — there is no form to perfect and no plan to submit. A message is enough to start the conversation.

Get in touch