The Jamba Juice chain of smoothie shops said Tuesday that strawberries sold in Arizona, southern Nevada and Southern California late last month may have been contaminated with listeria, a potentially deadly bacterium.

The announcement comes less than a week after South Florida mogul Steven Berrard purchased Jamba Juice Co. for $265 million on behalf of Fort Lauderdale-based Services Acquisition Corp. International and became the company's chairman.

Berrard, a longtime protégé of Fort Lauderdale billionaire H. Wayne Huizenga, is the former chief executive of Blockbuster Inc. and co-founder of AutoNation Inc. As head of Services Acquisition, he officially acquired the San Francisco-based smoothie chain last Wednesday and renamed the new subsidiary Jamba Inc.

Jamba Inc.'s CEO Paul Clayton, who until Wednesday was the president of the former Jamba Juice Co., also has South Florida roots: he was a former executive of Miami-based Burger King.

The potentially tainted frozen strawberries -- between 1,200 and 1,800 pounds of them -- were served between Nov. 25 and Dec. 1, said Clayton.

When SunOpta Inc.'s Cleugh's Frozen Foods unit detected the contamination and recalled the berries, San Francisco-based Jamba pulled the fruit from its stores and distribution centers.

"They should not have been distributed to our stores," Clayton said in a telephone interview Monday. "The protocols we have in place are such that products that test positive for contamination should not be sold in our stores."

Jamba said it notified the Food and Drug Administration and will alert state and local health officials. The company said it halted shipments from the plant where the listeria was found.

Norval, Ontario-based SunOpta didn't return two calls for comment after business hours. All of the potentially contaminated berries were sold to Jamba Juice, the company said in a statement distributed by Canada News Wire.

Listeria is especially dangerous to pregnant women, newborns and people with compromised immune systems, according to the Web site of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 2,500 Americans are sickened with listeria each year and about 500 of them die, the agency said. Pregnancy makes women 20 times more likely to fall ill, and AIDS increases susceptibility 300-fold, it said. Because symptoms can take months to develop, the agency recommends members of high-risk groups to watch for fevers and other major illnesses.

While Jamba hasn't received consumer complaints of poisoning, the company is setting up a toll-free consumer line, Clayton said.