Sprouts carry a real food safety risk. Section 1 is the most important part of this page, and it is not boilerplate. If you read nothing else here, read that.
This disclaimer applies to Sprouting Tracker (“the Service”), operated by On The Grow, LLC (“we”, “us” or “our”).
1. Food safety
Sprouts are grown in warm, humid conditions for several days. Those are the conditions a seed needs to germinate, and they are also the conditions bacteria need to multiply. Contamination usually arrives on the seed itself, before you ever open the bag, and a few cells present at the start can become a great many by harvest. Rinsing does not remove them.
The Service cannot detect contamination and does not certify that anything is safe to eat. It counts hours and days. A jar it shows as ready is a jar that has reached the age the catalog expects, and nothing more. Every judgement about whether to eat what you grew is yours.
Public health authorities, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, advise that children, older adults, pregnant people and anyone with a weakened immune system should not eat raw or lightly cooked sprouts. Thorough cooking substantially reduces the risk. If you are in one of those groups, or you are feeding somebody who is, take that advice over anything in this app.
Nothing in the Service should be taken as a suggestion that:
- Home sprouting is free of risk. It is not.
- Following the timings, rinse counts or sanitation notes in the Service makes a batch safe. It does not.
- A jar that looks, smells and grows normally is therefore uncontaminated. The organisms that make people ill are invisible and usually odourless.
- Any seed, supplier, method or piece of equipment named in the Service is endorsed or verified by us.
Throw out anything you are unsure about. A jar is worth a few cents and food poisoning is not.
2. General
The information and tools in the Service are provided for general informational purposes only. Everything is offered in good faith, but we make no representation or warranty of any kind, express or implied, about the accuracy, adequacy, validity, reliability, availability or completeness of any information or feature.
Your use of the Service, and your reliance on anything in it, is entirely at your own risk.
3. Not professional advice
The Service is a tracking tool. It is not a substitute for professional advice in food safety, medicine, nutrition, horticulture, business or any other field. We are not physicians, dietitians, food safety officers, agronomists or attorneys. Any nutritional figures shown are general reference values and are not a statement about what you personally grew or what you should eat. Consult a qualified professional where it matters, and speak to a doctor if you become unwell.
4. No guarantee of results
We do not guarantee that using the Service will give you a successful batch, a particular yield, a particular harvest date, or any saving over buying sprouts. Outcomes depend on seed quality and age, water, temperature, humidity, airflow, your equipment, your technique and your kitchen, none of which we can see. Soak hours, rinse counts, harvest windows, seed weights and cost figures in the Service are estimates drawn from a reference catalog and from the numbers you enter, and they are meant to be corrected by what actually happens in your jars.
Reminders are best effort. They depend on your device, your browser, your network and a push service run by your browser vendor, and any of those can delay or drop a notification. Do not treat the app as the only thing keeping a jar alive.
5. The Service is provided as it is
The Service is provided “as is” and “as available” without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, error-free or free of harmful components.
6. Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent permitted by law, On The Grow, LLC and its owners, members, officers, employees, contractors, agents and affiliates are not liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, consequential or punitive damages, nor for illness, lost or spoiled crops, wasted seed, lost profits or lost data, arising from your use of the Service, even if we were told the damage was possible. Our total liability is capped as set out in Section 12 of our Terms of Service, and claims must be brought within the time limit stated there. Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law.
7. Reference material and sources
The crop guides and growing protocols in the Service are compiled from published sources and from practical experience, and they are kept as honest as we can make them: where a figure is an estimate rather than a measurement, the app is designed to say so and to let you correct it. Sources disagree with each other, seed behaves differently between lots, and our catalog will sometimes simply be wrong. Treat it as a starting point to adjust, not as a specification to follow. If you find an error, please tell us; corrections from growers are how the catalog improves.
8. Trademarks
“On The Grow”, “OnTheGrow” and “Sprouting Tracker”, and related marks, are trademarks of On The Grow, LLC, certain of which are registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. This disclaimer and the Service apply only to the official Sprouting Tracker app operated by us at sproutingtracker.com. We are not responsible for the conduct or content of any other business or person using a similar name. Check you are on our official site before entering personal information.
9. Third-party services and links
The Service depends on and may link to third-party services, including hosting, authentication, email and payment providers. We are not responsible for their content, availability or privacy practices. Using them is at your own risk.
10. De-identified sprouting data
We collect de-identified sprouting data from use of the Service. It cannot identify you and it covers the facts of growing: which crop, how long it soaked, how often it was rinsed, whether it was greened, how many days to harvest, what it yielded, what it cost in seed, where you corrected our catalog, and whether the jar was harvested or thrown out. We use it to improve the Service, to fix the catalog, to develop industry insights and for our own research and business purposes. Part of our revenue model comes from this data, and we may use or license insights drawn from it. It excludes your identity, your labels, your notes and your messages; we keep it permanently, including after you delete your account, and we will not attempt to re-identify it. By using the Service you acknowledge and consent to this, as described in Section 6 of our Privacy Policy.
11. Changes
We may update this disclaimer. The “Last updated” date at the top reflects the latest version, and continuing to use the Service after a change means you accept it.
12. Incorporation
This disclaimer is incorporated into and forms part of our Terms of Service.
13. Contact
For our main website disclaimer, covering educational content, affiliate disclosure and additional trademark information, see onthegrow.net/pages/disclaimer.