Three days after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warned consumers not to eat red clover sprouts produced by Chicago Indoor Garden because they had been linked to an ongoing E. coli O103 outbreak, the company issued a recall for five products containing the sprouts.
The outbreak includes 14 people in five states who ate clover sprouts on sandwiches they purchased from Jimmy John’s restaurants. This ongoing outbreak is different than the Jimmy John’s clover sprouts E. coli outbreak that sickened 22 people in Iowa in December 2019.
During its investigation of the outbreak, the FDA collected and tested red clover sprouts from Chicago Indoor and found E. coli in one of the samples. Using Whole Genome Sequencing, a process that can identify a bacterial strain’s “genetic fingerprint” they found that the E. coli matches the outbreak strain cultured from the outbreak patients.
On March 13, 2020, the FDA issued a consumer recommendation to not eat five Chicago Indoor Graden products containing red clover sprouts: red clover (with and without non-GMO labels), sprout salad, mixed greens, and spring salad. The products have “best by” dates ranging from December 1, 2019, to March 12, 2020.
On March 16, 2020, Chicago Indoor issued a recall for those five products telling consumers not to eat them and that, at the time of the recall, no illnesses had been associated with them. The recalled products were sold at Whole Foods stores throughout the Midwest, Coosemans Chicago Inc., Battaglia Distributing, and Living Waters Farms.
In the announcement, the company also stated that it is holding raw material “that may be suspect” and is growing clover sprouts with seeds from another supplier. Neither the FDA nor Chicago Indoor named the supplier of the seeds associated with the recall.
If you developed an E. coli infection from contaminated clover sprouts served at Jimmy John’s or in Chicago Indoor Garden products and would like a free consultation with our team of food poisoning lawyers, please call 1-888-377-8900, text 612-261-0856 or complete the form below. Our team has successfully represented clients in every major E. coli outbreak in the last 20 years. We’d like to help you, too.