I grow pepper plants to sell. I don't sell the fruit, that's way too much work (growing and selling the plants is work enough). My dad's family is from Switzerland.
Pam

Where do you sell the plants?

At the local herb fairs, we have 4 every April (sure fills up the month, every saturday). Some people try to convince me to do the farmers markets, but right now the fairs is enough for me. My friend also sells hers online on localharvest. I keep threatening to do that, but it takes a lot of work to get them up and on the site, just not enough hours in the day.
Pam

I have had a certified plant nursery here in Florida for 28 years, but the peppers have been a little side line for me for the last 5 years. I am still trying to figure out what is the best thing to have for sale. I sell seeds. I send small flat rate boxes of fresh peppers all over the U.S. Locally, I sell pepper powder. Lastly I sell pepper plants, but I don't sell the small starter plants that everyone else does, I sell larger plants.
Here is some of the advice I can give you if you are just starting out. Also, I guess I should add that I have a degree in finance, so I'm going to look at this as an investment and what it takes to make the business happen. One of the old sayings in the nursery business around here is that anybody can grow plants, what makes or breaks a business is that you have to market what you have. Being able to sell what you have is way more important than just growing good plants. You need to look at other people in your country that are doing the same thing and see what they sell things for. As an example, there is another pepper forum that some people here are also on and there is a person who sells fresh peppers by the pound at an incredibly low price. She told me that she was just barely breaking even at the price she was asking them for, but she just loved getting peppers to people. So, it makes it hard to sell fresh peppers on that forum for a decent price. So I guess this is saying, if you want to sell fresh peppers, look to see if there are people selling so cheap that it makes it hard to sell yours at a decent price. If your greenhouse is going to cost a lot, you have to pay for it somehow, and also cover the cost of running the greenhouse. Also with fresh peppers, I found that you can't sell everything you have all the time. When you have fresh peppers ready to sell, there is a short window in which you can sell and ship out. This is why I do the powder. When things are slow, I take the extra peppers, dry them in an electric dehydrator, and grind them up in a coffee grinder. The powder has a shelf life of several months, so that keeps you from letting some peppers go bad.
On plants, I think I do the best because I do something that hardly anyone else does. How many people buy seeds or small plants and then you grow what you bought and 4 to 6 months later, you find out that you get some other looking pepper? Then it is to late to start over, so your entire season is trashed. I don't know about anyone else, but I get all excited waiting to try my new hot pepper and I feel cheated out of six months that I will never get back. Out what happens if you kill your small plants or your seeds die, and don't have time to start any more plants? I sell 1 gallon plants that are already flowering, and sometimes, already have pods on them. I can so these to 47 states easily. Then at the local level, I am selling 3 gallon plants with a 32 inch tall, metal tomato cage, that are already producing pods and are already near the top of the cage. In fact, most of the year, these plants will have ready to eat peppers right on the plants. So, customers can pick their plant that is producing pods at once. For those who care about genetics, like with the inconsistency with types like the reapers, you can pick out a plant that has pods exactly the way you want.
Anyway, this is the way I am doing things after learning what people want. If you have more questions, I'd be happy to help, but mainly, you have to do your own local homework to see what will work for you.

Thanks for the information. Last year I grew way too many plants. When they were up and running I listed them on craigslist and got a few customers. (Don't consider craigslist to be a marketing solution.)

The problem I had was how to price them. I could find no reliable comparables online since as you say few sellers deal in 1+ gal plants and no nearby nurseries had the exotics. How do you price yours?

Dennis

My main business is rare cycads. For those people who don't know about prices of some of the blue Encephalartos plants, some go for $1000+ per inch of stem diameter. I am in Florida and the closest places that have what I have here, are in California. I have to guess what plants like this should go for in Florida, which is less than what they go for in California.
So on these pepper plants I just had to guess what they were worth and maybe make a better deal for the customers. In the wholesale landscape plant market, we use 3 gallon, 7 gallon, and 15 gallon containers. Pretty much, when you go to the next size container, you double the price of the plant.
Looking at the plants you get from a place like Refining Chile's, you get a 2 or 2 1/2 inch potted plant that is rather thin, but most will grow out fine. These plants go for $7 to $10 for reapers. If you look at those numbers, a 4 inch plant should go for twice those prices, and a 1 gallon plant should go for twice that price. 3s would be twice the price of the 1s. Now, I have seen super hot plants going for $4-$5 at less expensive places and at that rate, a 1 gallon plant would go for $20. Instead of trying to get $20 to $35 for a 1 gallon plant, that many people wouldn't want to spend that much on, I went with $15, and it makes it hard to keep these available to people at that price. With these softer plants, you really don't want them sitting around for a longer period of time. With my 3s, I doubled the price, but added the worth of the frame. With everyone else's plants or seeds, you don't find out what you bought for months, I don't know how anyone else feels, but being able to pick the plant with perfect pods, priceless.
Going to start a new thread on genetics right after I finish on this, but what I talk about is also part of advice for this question.

Good reference metric. I under-priced; my two most expensive plants were $10, both heavily populated. Others were $3-5. All customers left with 5 or more pots, which ultimately was fine - I wanted to find them homes rather than make a profit.

But this tells me that if I could generate more traffic I could keep the prices up. Hmmm...

Dennis

DM, I just went to a pepper festival where they're was a guy selling little pepper plants in 4 inch pots. The plants were about 3 to 4 inches tall and many of them had stems so thin, I would be worried that they might break off when bringing them home. He did have reaper plants though. The plants were $8 each and during the 10 minutes I was there talking to him, he sold 12 plants. Having a good quality plant deserves a higher price. His plants wouldn't even be flowering for a couple of months, yet alone, if you are selling plants with either flowers already on it, or pods ready to go. That had to be worth something.
On another note, if you saw what I wrote about genetics in the other thread, if you end up selling fresh peppers as well as selling plants, you need to start a lot more plants of you are selling them as opposed to only growing enough to produce fresh peppers. Growing the extra plants gives you a chance to observe that many more plants, and you also get to see which plants are stronger, and produce pods that are exactly what you want to sell. The one great thing I have found about being a nursery grower as well as a collector is that when I grow many small cycads for sale, I get to pull that one exceptional seedling out every once in a while and keep it for myself. Every once in a while you get a variegated plant or one with faciated leaflets. With the peppers, you get to pick the one out that, for example, may have the gnarliest bumpy reaper pepper with a huge tail to use later on for breeding. The more plants you get to look at, the better your quality will be all the way around.

I can certainly attest to that - I kept some great plants from last year. Unfortunately they all went to that great big icebox in the sky during the move.

When I have the opportunity, I will produce way too many plants again!

Dennis

I was just allotted more space to grow some plants and rather than selling the plants or the fresh peppers, I plan to dehydrate them and sell the pepper powder. I recently found a nice blend of two peppers that has a nice heat and a great flavor!

If I can get a decent harvest, I'll dehydrate them, grind 'em up and throw them in nice little charges. I'm hoping to charge about $15/small jar.