Recalled alfalfa sprouting seeds tied to E. coli and Salmonella reached 44 states

Berlin Seeds of Millersburg, Ohio, recalled its alfalfa sprouting seed on September 23 after learning that seed it sold had reached a sprout grower whose finished sprouts were caught up in a federal investigation of Shiga toxin-producing E. coli and Salmonella Agona infections. The recall notice lists distribution to 44 states, from Alaska and Washington to Florida and Maine. One illness has been reported directly to the company.

The seed itself was never tested and found positive. What triggered the pull was a supplier’s phone call: a spent irrigation water sample from one of Berlin Seeds’ lots came back positive for E. coli, and the seed lot connected to it had gone out to a grower whose sprouts were already part of a multistate illness cluster federal investigators were tracing.

Berlin Seeds’ irrigation water tested positive

The full account sits in the recall notice the company filed with the FDA. The path from field to store shelf runs through water more than most shoppers realize. Alfalfa seed is soaked and rinsed repeatedly during sprouting, and any pathogen sitting in the water used at that stage rides along with every batch it touches. Berlin Seeds’ notice does not describe how the contaminated water was discovered, only that a supplier flagged it after the fact, which is the ordinary sequence for a seed-borne sprout recall: the illness cluster surfaces first, and testing works backward to the lot.

That backward trace is why the recalled item is the raw seed rather than a bag of finished sprouts. Berlin Seeds sold roughly 950 pounds of alfalfa sprouting seed in quarter-pound, half-pound, one-pound, five-pound and 50-pound packages between February 13 and August 23, according to Food Safety News. Only the five- and 50-pound bags, sold mainly to commercial sprouters rather than home gardeners, carry the lot code SAL2-24JB printed in the bottom right corner; the smaller retail packages carry no lot code at all, which is part of why the company widened the recall to the entire run instead of a single dated batch.

Forty-four states, one seed lot, five package sizes

Forty-four is not a rounded estimate. It is the count of states the FDA notice itself lists by name, running from Alaska, Arizona and California through Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wyoming. A seed distributor that size sells wholesale, to sprouters and garden retailers who repackage or grow it out before it reaches a produce case, which is a large part of why a single contaminated lot can surface as illnesses in places that never heard of Berlin Seeds.

The company’s own guidance, echoed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is blunt: do not eat any recalled sprouts, and do not try to salvage them by cooking or rinsing. Sprouts grown from contaminated seed carry bacteria throughout the plant tissue, not just on the surface, so washing does not make them safe. Anyone still holding the seed is told to seal it in a bag before throwing it out and to sanitize any counter, bin or sprouting jar it touched.

The outbreak the recall is chasing

Berlin Seeds is the supplier, not the source of the sprouts people actually ate. The illnesses federal investigators have been counting trace to a separate brand, Everything Sprouts, whose alfalfa sprouts were sold under the Calco and Everything Sprouts labels. As of a September 1 update on the CDC’s open investigation page, 55 people across 15 states had gotten sick, four badly enough to be hospitalized, with no deaths reported. The strains match exactly what Berlin Seeds’ notice names — STEC O26:H11, O103:H25 and O168:H8, plus Salmonella Agona — which is the genetic thread investigators used to work backward from sick patients to a seed supplier three steps removed from anyone’s plate.

Interview data cited on the CDC’s outbreak page makes the sprout connection hard to dismiss as coincidence: among people who got sick and were asked what they had eaten, 76% reported alfalfa sprouts, against roughly 9% in a comparison survey of healthy adults. That gap is what turns a cluster of unrelated stomach bugs into a traceback investigation, and it is what eventually pointed regulators at seed rather than at any single retailer or restaurant.

The FDA has said it is still working to determine whether other sprout growers used seed from the same contaminated supply chain, which is the open question behind Berlin Seeds’ decision to recall everything it shipped in a six-month window rather than one lot. The agency’s own language on the matter is spare but specific: the seed was “used by a sprout grower whose finished sprouts were part of an FDA investigation involving a multistate foodborne illness outbreak,” a description that puts Berlin Seeds squarely inside an active case file rather than a routine precaution.

What a home sprouter can actually check

Home sprouting kits use the same raw alfalfa seed sold in small bags, and the recall covers those retail sizes even though they carry no printed lot code. Anyone who bought loose or bagged alfalfa sprouting seed for home use between mid-February and late August has no easy way to confirm whether it came from the recalled run, which is exactly the gap the FDA’s advice is built to close: treat any alfalfa sprouting seed purchased in that window as suspect, stop sprouting it, and throw out any sprouts already grown rather than checking them by smell or appearance.

Symptoms from either pathogen typically start within a few days of exposure — diarrhea, cramping and fever for Salmonella, often bloody diarrhea for the Shiga toxin-producing strains, which in a small share of cases can progress to kidney failure, particularly in young children and older adults. The CDC’s standing advice for anyone in that position is to contact a healthcare provider directly rather than wait out symptoms at home, a recommendation that carries more weight given how many states this particular seed lot reached before anyone traced it back to Millersburg, Ohio.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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