Schools, hospitals and popular burger restaurants such as Hero’s and Lick’s are part of a suddenly massive beef recall over fears of E. coli contamination.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency on Tuesday expanded its recall of packaged ground beef products to include 135 items sold in supermarkets and at hotels, restaurants and institutions.

The agency is trying to make sure nobody eats any beef produced at the now-closed Saskatoon plant of New Food Classics over seven months, from July 1, 2011 to Feb. 15, 2012.

One person fell ill in October from a beef product from that plant, triggering the investigation that continues, the CFIA’s Garfield Balsom told the Star on Tuesday.

“We are trying to identify the source of that contamination,” he said. “Through Health Canada, we have determined that all of these products should be recalled. It is a very large list of products.”

“The whole food industry is totally confused by this,” a spokesman for Alberta ranchers Heritage Angus Beef, which supplies Hero’s Burgers, told the Star.

“This has gone from food safety to over the top.”

The recall started Feb. 18 with some cases of packaged frozen beef burgers and expanded nine times, culminating in a recall that now includes several Loblaws brands, the Irresistibles brand sold at Metro, the Keg, Lick’s, Hero’s, Country Morning, Best Value, Calgary Stampede, Western Family, Webers, Maple Lodge Farms and Grillhouse.

“It’s all gone by now,” Hero’s spokesman Carlo Lucia told the Star. The company had New Food Classics process three sizes of its Angus Beef burgers from beef raised by a group of 22 Heritage Angus ranches in Alberta until New Food closed.

Hero’s received a CFIA phone call Tuesday and checked its freezers to make sure the pre-Feb. 15 products were gone.

All of the single Lick’s product processed by New Food has never been released and remains in storage where it will be destroyed, Lick’s President Denise Meehan told the Star.

“We shouldn’t have been included in this. We are a victim of this media message,” she said. Ninety per cent of its inventory is processed by Cargill’s, not New Food, she said.

Burgers and beef sliders might be off the menu for a few days at some Keg’s as the restaurant chain destroys all of the Prime Rib Beef Burgers processed by New Food, said spokeswoman Karyn Byrne.

Some beef products processed during the recall period have been sold by the Keg, she said. “We have had no food safety issues.”

The latest recall, said Balsom, includes fresh beef burgers “which would probably be consumed by now but may have been frozen instead.”

Among the institutions alerted to the risk would be schools, hospitals and nursing homes, he said.

New Food Classics went into receivership Feb. 22, locking out hundreds of workers at its plants in Saskatoon and St. Catharines. In 2010, the company had moved its headquarters to Burlington from Calgary and took over a closed poultry processing plant in St. Catharines with the help of a $1-million grant from the Ontario government.

Balsom said he was not aware of a connection between the receivership and the recall.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

The CFIA says the affected products are identified by the Establishment number 761 that appears on the packages, cartons or cases. Establishment 761 is the Saskatoon plant.

A full list of the affected beef products can be found at the CFIA website.

Food contaminated with E. coli O157: H7 may not look or smell spoiled, but eating it may cause serious and potentially life-threatening illnesses.