Hope Sprouts Eternal

Ask a food safety professional which foods they avoid eating, and sprouts will likely land at the top of the list.

QA contributing editor Darin Detwiler was even quoted as saying so in the recent documentary “Poisoned: The Dirty Truth About Your Food,” where he ranked sprouts as the No. 2 food he avoids, second only to cantaloupe, due to the whopping number of foodborne illness outbreaks that have been linked to the innocuous-looking microgreens over the years.

That is, until he called to let us know about the company that changed his mind: Wild About Sprouts, the subject of our cover story.

Ask a food safety professional which foods they avoid eating, and sprouts will likely land at the top of the list.

After hearing Detwiler’s denouncement of sprouts in “Poisoned,” the Wild About Sprouts team invited him to their Sacramento facility to show him how they were going about the sprouts production process in a totally new way — growing the nutrient-dense miniature veggies from seed in cold temperatures, untouched by human hands. It’s a setting opposite from the warm, moist growing environment of traditional sprouts facilities that can become a breeding ground for harmful pathogens.

Detwiler was so impressed with the innovative approach at Wild About Sprouts that he encouraged us to go see for ourselves. So, in July, I flew out to Sacramento, Calif., to see what the hype was about. There, hidden in plain sight in an unassuming business park, resides a facility capable of nurturing nearly 500 million living plants at any given time and a team fully focused on food safety, quality and their track record of zero recalls since the company’s inception in 2016.

From the moment I stepped through Wild About Sprouts’ production room doors and directly into the sanitizing foot dip mats stationed at each entryway, the company’s commitment to safety was evident. As I journeyed through the life cycle of a sprout, learning along the way about the company’s patented COLD-GROWN technology and its rigorous pathogen-testing protocol for each lot it produces, any preconceived notions of the oft-scrutinized food were squashed, with a fresh, hopeful outlook on the sprouts industry taking root in their place.