The United Fresh Produce Association estimates that the tomato industry lost more than $100 million while the warning was in effect. Industry leaders have said they hope to get compensation from Congress to make up for losses, and those who are to appear Thursday said they also planned to demand a stricter burden of proof before the F.D.A. blames a particular food product for any future outbreak.  “More important than the financial loss is the loss of consumer confidence,” said Kathy Means, vice president for government relations at the Produce Marketing Association. “This has long-term effects for the industry.”  One former F.D.A. official, Michael Taylor, now a professor at George Washington University, called the current situation “a turning point” for food safety regulation.  “This outbreak has had a really serious effect on the industry,” Mr. Taylor said. “The industry is probably receptive to public policy changes that they wouldn’t have considered before.”  Representative Bart Stupak, a Michigan Democrat who is a member of the House committee, said in a telephone interview Wednesday, “I think the bigger players in the industry will all be coming in and saying, ‘We want regulation,’ which is a change.”  While tomatoes may not have been the culprit, Mr. Stupak said, this outbreak still shows the industry’s inability to identify quickly all the places where contaminated produce has been distributed.  Food safety experts say a better system for tracking food throughout the supply chain could help identify the source of outbreaks sooner, as well as quickly eliminate regions and products that are mistakenly suspected of being the source.  Current rules, adopted under the Bioterrorism Act of 2002, require that produce processors and distributors keep track of where food goes and comes from, but only one step forward and one step back in the supply chain.  Those rules do not apply to farms or restaurants. And the records can be kept on paper and in a multitude of formats, making the tracing of fresh produce, which has a short shelf life, a cumbersome task, said Dr. David Acheson, the F.D.A.’s associate commissioner for foods.  “What a faster system would have done,” he said, “is allowed us to trace back more quickly to get into the distribution centers and onto farms, to eliminate suspected areas quickly.”  Food industry leaders said trace-back systems had worked in this outbreak; it was just that tomatoes were the wrong target, they said. Still, they are pushing an initiative under which produce companies would voluntarily track fresh produce globally using identification tags that could be scanned into computer systems.  In telephone interviews, several leaders said that as long as the F.D.A. did not dictate the specific type of technology, they would not object if the agency mandated that “high-risk commodities” — fresh produce particularly susceptible to bacterial contamination, like tomatoes — be traceable within a certain time period back to the farm of origin.  “If there are holes in the system and the only way of addressing those is regulation, then we are not opposed to that,” said Bryan Silbermann, president of the Produce Marketing Association.  The Grocery Manufacturers Association also supports regulation that would “level the playing field” so that producers with toothless safety standards or trace-back systems are forced to reform, said Robert E. Brackett, a senior vice president of the association and onetime F.D.A. official.  Tim Hammonds, president of the Food Marketing Institute, said current regulations did not go far enough because they did not require restaurants or farmers to track fresh produce.  “It’s the government’s job here to say that industry needs to develop an effective trace-back system,” Mr. Hammonds said, “and then hold the industry accountable without trying to define exactly how it’s done.”  A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Amid Salmonella Case, Food Industry Seems Set to Back Greater Regulation. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Industry leaders are questioning whether the weak produce-tracking rules that many of them once championed are more a curse than a blessing, several food safety experts say.