After working with food safety experts, we’ve recently changed the labels on all of our products to include the following statements:
Buckwheat products: Buckwheat is a raw agricultural ingredient and must be fully cooked before enjoying.
Wheat flour products: Wheat is a raw agricultural product that is not subjected to a microbiological kill step. This product is not ready to eat and is intended for further processing.
Our products, whether buckwheat or wheat, do not go through a five-log reduction kill step during the milling process that most “ready to eat foods” go through. This means we don’t test for typical pathogens like E. coli or Salmonella.
After a series of flour recalls over the past few years, and ever-changing FSMA regulations, we decided to add this language to make sure we’re exceeding the highest food safety standards.
We do recommend you cook the product before consuming it. We often think of it like baking cookies – they say you should never eat raw cookie dough because of the raw flour that is in there.