Broccoli Sprouts Salmonella Outbreak: What to Do With Yours

Last updated: September 15, 2026. Everything below reflects official CDC, FDA and state health department updates as of September 2026. Outbreak investigations change, so check the CDC and FDA pages linked at the end for the current status.

Evergreen Fresh Sprouts, LLC recalled 215 cases of broccoli sprouts because of possible Salmonella contamination. The company is based in Moyie Springs, Idaho, and the recalled product went to Idaho, Montana and Washington. Because sprouts are sold loose and repacked at some retailers, the product may have reached shoppers without a recognizable brand label on the container, which is exactly why the advice is to discard rather than to inspect.

The strain is Salmonella Bovismorbificans, confirmed by whole genome sequencing from an unopened package of broccoli sprouts collected in Montana. That is a strong link. Sequencing a sample from sealed product ties the bacteria in sick people to the food itself rather than to a kitchen where it was later handled.

In interviews, 19 people were asked what they ate before getting sick. All 19, so 100 percent, reported eating sprouts, and 17 of them, 89 percent, specifically reported broccoli sprouts. Washington State reported 13 ill people as of September 2, 2026, with illness onset dates ranging from July 7 to August 18, and additional cases were reported in Montana and Idaho. A total nationwide case count and hospitalization count are not specified in official updates as of September 2026. Any larger figure circulating elsewhere should be treated as unverified.

This is not bad luck, and it is not really about one farm. Sprouts are grown by keeping seeds warm and wet for several days, which is close to ideal for germination and also close to ideal for bacterial growth. If even a few pathogens are present on the seed, that warm humid period can multiply them dramatically before anything reaches a shelf.

Seed contamination is the root of the problem. Sprouting seeds are grown in fields, harvested, and stored, and a pathogen picked up anywhere in that chain travels into the sprouting room. Because there is no cooking step between the seed and your plate, nothing downstream removes it. Some pathogens can also be taken up into the interior of the seedling, which is why surface washing and even commercial rinses do not guarantee safety.

That combination is why public health agencies have flagged raw sprouts as higher risk for decades, and why the same warning appears for alfalfa, clover, mung bean and broccoli sprouts alike. It sits in the same category of repeated produce risk we walked through in why there are so many food recalls in 2026: better detection is finding real problems that used to go unnoticed, and fresh produce eaten raw has the fewest safety nets.

If you were eating broccoli sprouts specifically for the sulforaphane, cooked sprouts still deliver plenty of the plant's compounds, and so do broccoli, cabbage and kale prepared normally. The nutrition case for eating them raw is far weaker than the internet suggests, a pattern we found again when we looked at whether the Mediterranean diet is worth the hype, and the general lesson about how strong a claim needs to be shows up in our look at the breakfast myth. On the cooking side, a hot pan is your friend, and the same crisping logic in crispy baked salmon with garlic butter applies here: dry heat, short time, big flavor.