The beef was sold in bulk to restaurants and institutional food services; it was not sold for retail purchases and thus does not appear on supermarket shelves.
The federal Department of Agriculture (USDA), which recommended the recall to Rochester Meat on the strength of investigations by Wisconsin and California state authorities, has a policy of not revealing the purchasers of contaminated recalled meat. Consequently, consumers now do not know which restaurants received the Rochester meat and which did not.

Attorney Bill Marler writes on his legal blog, "I have received a few phone calls and emails from concerned people about the complete failure of our national and state health authorities to tell the public where the E. coli-tainted meat from Rochester Meat landed on the public's plate. One consistently mentioned name of the recipient of the E. coli-tainted meat is the national restaurant chain, Tony Roma's." Neither the USDA nor Tony Roma's, which has locations in twenty states and over 260 worldwide, have responded to this report.
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Another legal blogger sums it up even more simply: "Maybe public health officials can try a bit harder at protecting the public by letting consumers know which restaurants may have received the potentially dangerous meat?" Maybe they could; maybe the restaurant chains could let us know whether they received the contaminated product and whether that have pulled it from their stock; maybe many things could be done to protect the public better. For the time being, though, all we hear is a deafening silence.