Doug Evans was living out in the Mojave Desert—off the grid, no grocery stores, no Whole Foods down the road, just dirt and rocks and silence. He had gone raw vegan years earlier after his parents got sick—cancer, heart disease. So food wasn’t just food. It was the thing he used to keep himself alive.
But out in Wonder Valley, even lettuce was a two-hour drive. And gardening? Not in that dirt. He tried. Nothing grew. So he started sprouting.
Just glass jars. A handful of seeds. Rinse with water in the morning, rinse again at night. That’s it. He stacked six jars next to the sink and within a few weeks he was eating almost entirely from his countertop. Lentil sprouts, mung beans, broccoli, clover—whatever seeds he had. No soil, no sunlight. Just water and time.
He’d eat bowls of them. Sprout salads. Sprouts on avocado. Sprouts by the handful. He once made a video of himself watching a movie with a bowl of sprouts in his lap like popcorn. “You can’t overeat sprouts,” he said. “They’re self-limiting.” That little desert experiment is what led to The Sprouting Company.
Doug wasn’t the first person to sprout seeds. Hippies have been doing it for decades. What surprised him was just how much food you could grow in so little space. He was getting thousands of calories out of six jars. Fresh, crunchy, living food—without needing to cook, store, refrigerate, or even go outside. The whole thing ran on water and gravity.
He started reading everything he could find. Studies on broccoli sprouts and sulforaphane. Detoxification pathways. How sprouts can have 20x the nutrients of the adult plant. He called experts. Took notes. Wrote a book. The Sprout Book. It came out in 2020. People were stuck at home. Grocery store shelves were empty. Suddenly sprouts didn’t sound so fringe.
More people started trying it. Jars showed up on windowsills and dish racks. Sprouts in smoothies, sprouts in sandwiches, sprouts in soups. He started getting emails from strangers: “I’m sprouting now.” “I got my dad into it.” “I’ve been eating these every day.”
That’s when he realized: people wanted to do this. They just didn’t want to guess how. So he made the thing he wished he’d had from the beginning. A wide glass jar with a custom lid. Built-in mesh strainer. Stainless steel. Easy to clean. Designed so you could tilt it upside down and let it drain without propping it up on a spoon or balancing it at an angle like people do with mason jars.
It’s called The Sprouter. Just one jar, but with the right lid and base, it takes care of the hard part—which, really, is just keeping the seeds moist but not soggy. The kit comes with seeds too. Organic, of course. Mostly broccoli, because Doug’s obsessed with sulforaphane. But also blends: radish, lentil, clover, mung, pea. Some people go spicy. Some go mild. Some just mix everything and scoop it into their blender with half a banana.
It’s not fancy. There’s no power cord. No display screen. It’s just a jar and seeds. But that’s kind of the point.
Doug talks a lot about food independence. He likes the idea that you don’t need land, money, or electricity to grow something. You can live in an apartment and still harvest your own food every four days.
And this isn’t “grow a tomato in six weeks.” This is: soak some seeds tonight, rinse them in the morning, and by the weekend you’ve got a mason jar full of crunchy greens. Kids can do it. Elderly people can do it. People with no garden, no backyard, no time. You don’t need green thumbs. Just running water.
He thinks every household should have a sprouting jar next to the dish soap. That’s his version of a farm. The fridge is the garden.
Doug still eats sprouts every day. Still lives out in the desert. Still talks about them like it’s the best life hack no one’s figured out yet.
He says sprouting isn’t a trend. It’s something people have done for thousands of years. He’s just trying to make it normal again.
That’s what The Sprouting Company is for. Not to revolutionize nutrition. Just to make sprouts less weird and more doable. So that maybe, on some Tuesday afternoon, someone opens a cabinet, pulls out a jar and a scoop of seeds, and starts growing food on their own kitchen counter.
