Prevent Default Widgets Loading on Activation

Normally when designing new themes, I’ve always put my own default loading widget(s) in my theme. However, with my latest theme, I didn’t do this but see WordPress still loads its default list of widgets in the sidebar.

I know you can deregister widgets but this is not what I want to do…I would like to find a method via functions.php to prevent WordPress from loading its own default widgets when my theme is activated on a new clean install. I would like the user to have a blank sidebar to start without having to do anything. Is there a snippet of code to do this?
Thanks in advance!