A Cache Valley nursery, a seed sideline and a move to Salt Lake City.

True Leaf Market is a seed company in Salt Lake City, Utah, that sells garden, sprouting, microgreen and wheatgrass seed, along with growing supplies. Its website calls it “Your Non-GMO Seed Source Since 1974,” but the name itself dates from 2014: the company describes True Leaf Market as the result of several older seed businesses coming together, and the 1974 date belongs to the oldest of them.

That business was Mountain Valley Seed Co. According to a company history published on its blog in July 2024, it was started in 1974 by Demetrios “Demo” Agathangelides, who grew up in Greece, attended the American Farm School there and moved to the United States in 1957. The company says he studied at Ricks College in Idaho and then worked in the plant science department at Utah State University in Logan before opening his own nursery, Greek Gardens, in the Cache Valley.

The company tells the rest of the story this way: Agathangelides noticed that varieties developed or recommended by Utah State professors suited local gardens better than much of what the commercial seed trade offered, so he and his wife, Diane, bought those varieties in bulk and packed them by hand at home. When the seed side grew, he sold the nursery, kept the seed business and renamed it Mountain Valley Seed Co., at first a mail-order supplier for gardeners in the Intermountain West. The company dates its move to Salt Lake City to 1993, and says he spent decades promoting short-season vegetable varieties through seminars and local radio gardening programmes.

Sprouts, wheatgrass and a 2014 merger.

The second strand of the company is indoor growing. The company says that in 2000 the siblings Parker Garlitz and Kaitlin Jones started wheatgrasskits.com, an online shop selling seed and supplies for growing wheatgrass at home, and later bought Handy Pantry, a sprouting-seed business that the company says was first established in 1974 and sold through retailers and distributors.

In 2014, the company says, two college friends, Lance Heaton and Robb Baumann, bought Mountain Valley Seed Co. from Agathangelides, met Garlitz and Jones, and the businesses merged as True Leaf Market. An archived copy of its website from October 2016 shows that arrangement in practice: the site described itself as offering “Seeds and More for Gardening, Sprouting, Growing Microgreens,” listed Mountain Valley Seeds, Handy Pantry and Wheatgrass Kits among its featured brands, and invited customers to a showroom in Salt Lake City.

The company has since added further names. In early 2022 the owners of Kitazawa Seed Company, Maya Shiroyama and Jim Ryugo, announced that they had entrusted the brand and its range of Asian vegetable varieties to True Leaf Market, which would move it into its Salt Lake City facility while they stayed on as ambassadors. The company says Kitazawa was founded around 1917 in San Jose, California, by Gijiu Kitazawa, and that it still packs Kitazawa seed in manila envelopes printed in green ink in his honour; the old kitazawaseed.com address now forwards to a Kitazawa collection on the True Leaf Market site. True Leaf Market’s about page also says it took over the running of Sustainable Seed Co. after that company was hit by the 2018 wildfire in Paradise, California, and that the arrangement was made permanent in summer 2021.

The R1152 seed companies.

The seven brands in this group are all garden seed names: D.T. Brown, Moles Seeds, Franchi, De Bolster, Veseys, Seeds of Change and True Leaf Market. Seed companies in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to larger horticultural groups, and a single name can reach gardeners through a printed catalogue, a garden-centre rack or a website.

A seed brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a packet, a catalogue and a name, because the company behind it may have changed hands, moved premises or changed where its seed is grown and packed. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its seed is grown, cleaned and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its seed comes from and how its packets have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From reseller to grower and breeder.

The most recent step brought seed production into the business. The company says that in 2023 True Leaf Market merged with Seeds by Design, a wholesale seed producer founded by the plant breeder Patty Buskirk, who now leads the combined company as chief executive alongside Baumann, Heaton, Garlitz and Jones. California Bountiful, the California Farm Bureau’s magazine, profiled Buskirk in its November–December 2020 issue as the owner and chief plant breeder of Seeds by Design, which she founded in 1994, with offices in the Sacramento Valley communities of Maxwell and Willows; she described it there as “a boutique breeding and production company.” True Leaf Market’s homepage now calls Seeds by Design its division in Maxwell, California, and says its orders are handled from a warehouse in Salt Lake City.

The company has also grown seed in Utah itself. A post on its blog says that in 2021 it began field trials on a farm at Caineville, in Wayne County near Capitol Reef National Park, managed by Kat Jones and the local farmer Seth Peterson, with the aim of producing its own varieties through selective breeding; the company describes the dry, hot site as suited to heat-loving vegetables such as tomatoes and peppers. On its about page the company says all of its seed is non-GMO, that it has signed the Safe Seed Pledge and that many of its seeds were grown on its own farm; those are the company’s own statements.

For a design guide, True Leaf Market shows how a merged business can keep older names, such as Mountain Valley, Handy Pantry and Kitazawa, alive as brands under one shopfront. Compare Baker Creek, another American heirloom seed house, and Park Seed, or Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, the Virginia seed co-operative. For this guide we use leaf green, sprout green and seed gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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