Grocery Store Produce is Gross—Here's the Proof (and solution)

Whether you're loading up on fruits and veggies for breastfeeding meal ideas or just trying to help a picky eater toddler meet her dietary needs, this astounding TikTok video is a must-see. Why? Because grocery store produce is apparently teeming with grime, grossness and filth.

TikTok creator Amy Hinch recently racked up about 29 million views by showing her followers how truly disgusting even the best grocery store produce can be. She places all the typical bestsellers like grapes, blueberries and spinach in water with an ultrasonic produce cleaning device and let's it go to work.

The short video showed a bowl full of juicy red grapes being soaked and cleaned with the gadget. After just a few minutes, the bowl of water the grapes were sitting in had turned to a stomach-turning brownish-gray color with flecks of dirt and debris. Uch.

“This is what we eat,” Hinch says in an exasperated tone of the items she purchased in her local produce department. “This is so freaking nasty. We need to watch what we eat.”

She added in the caption that she had even washed the grapes twice before the water eventually came out clean. Disgusted and shocked comments poured in.

"OMG, I had no idea... I just give them a quick rinse under the sink," said one beleaguered viewer.

Another quipped, "Buying this machine ASAP."

The device works on all fresh fruit and vegetables, it seems. Amy's video has spurned an avalanche of copycat content showing disgusting broccoli cleaning sessions, cauliflower, corn and worst of all—strawberries. Seriously, if you go down a TikTok ultrasonic cleaning rabbithole and get to the strawberry videos, come with an empty stomach.

How does an ultrasonic cleaner work, anyway?

Ultrasonic cleaning works through high-frequency sound waves transmitted through liquid (like a bowl of water) to clean the surface of all the immersed items and parts. These high-frequency sound waves typically reach 40 kHz, though they can't be detected by human ears.

These high frequencies act like a solvent, causing dirt and grime to be released from just about anything immersed in the wave-impacted water. The machines turn ordinary water into nearly-magical cleaning solutions to scrub fresh produce clean. And yes, most offer built-in digital timers to make the task extremely fool-proof.

Where to buy an ultrasonic produce cleaner

The best place to buy a grocery store producer cleaning gadget is Amazon, where they retail for about $40 and reportedly last for "years." Don't have an Amazon membership? That's OK—here's how to get one without paying (and a ton of other free stuff from Amazon).