"For a tomato trace-back, this is going very quickly," Acheson said. "They're really hard to track -- it's a spider's web of suppliers and distributors."
Unlike bags of spinach or jars of peanut butter, products linked to recent health scares, individual tomatoes don't have bar codes, making tracking difficult.
Many growers and retailers have expressed frustration over the duration of the investigation, and some consumers said they weren't happy with the federal government either.
"It was a crazy reaction to the problem," said Henry Lowenfels, 26, an independent film producer from Echo Park who was shopping Wednesday at a Vons in Hollywood.
The self-described "tomato guy" said he was irritated that his favorite fruit had disappeared from shelves for so long, but added: "If it were to happen again, then I'd be worried" about the safety of tomatoes.
This is the country's 13th salmonella outbreak linked to tomatoes since 1990, according to officials.
The FDA posted its advisory June 7, warning that fresh Roma, plum and red round tomatoes were at risk.
Big supermarket chains and fast-food conglomerates took no chances, removing the fruit from shelves and menus and destroying tomatoes being kept in reserve. Many consumers avoided tomatoes altogether.
Supermarkets such as Vons said they made up the difference with the cherry, grape and vine-attached tomatoes that were cleared by the FDA.
"There really was no time when we had no tomatoes," said Teena Massingill, a spokeswoman for Safeway Inc., which owns Vons. "Once we pulled the affected products, we filled those spaces with product that had been approved."
Farmers were hit hard. In Florida, the nation's top tomato producer, experts estimated that more than $40 million of the fruit was destroyed.
In a letter Tuesday to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the United Fresh Produce Assn. said the outbreak undercut consumer confidence and could cost the national tomato industry more than $100 million.
With a 25-pound box of U.S. tomatoes selling for about $15 on the East Coast and a box of Mexican tomatoes going for $8 to $10 in California, domestic producers were feeling the pressure to drop their prices, Ed Beckman, president of the California Tomato Farmers cooperative, said in an e-mail.
Several buyers switched permanently last week from California tomatoes to Canadian tomatoes over distrust of and confusion about which growing regions had been cleared by the FDA, Beckman said.
