Despite its best efforts to reassure the public, Cadbury's remains in the media headlines

The Cadbury's saga continues with the recent Foods Standards Agency investigation concluding that the confectionery giant's risk assessment procedures were inadequate, and revealing that there was also an unreported outbreak of salmonella in Cadbury's Herefordshire plant back in 2002.

The FSA said that the Cadbury's Marlbrook factory at the center of the current salmonella scare was infected with the same strain of the disease ? the very rare Montevideo bacterium - four years ago.

It also found that the confectionery giant had failed to adequately assess the risk of salmonella in its chocolate through the use of "unreliable" methods that may have underestimated the scale and likelihood of contamination.

The FSA concluded: ?The presence of salmonella in ready-to-eat foods such as chocolate is unacceptable at any level.?

It said: ?Cadbury's risk assessment assumes that a threshold for infection can be estimated from previous outbreak data on levels of micro-organisms in chocolate. Such a threshold is not the same as the minimum infectious dose for salmonella in chocolate; no minimum infectious dose can be defined and infections may occur in consumers exposed to significantly lower levels than that seen in previous outbreaks.?

The committee also commented that where contaminated chocolate crumb was used in the manufacture of products other than those recalled, there could also be a cause for concern. However, the committee acknowledged that it was difficult to quantify the risk.

According to Cadburys, however, the chocolate on the shelves now in retail outlets are safe. Cadburys says that it has tested literally tens of thousands of items of confectionary and has not identified one single case of salmonella contamination. Product lines are currently being tested at least four times each day, says the company.

A week ago Cadburys took over one million chocolate bars off the market after salmonella had been identified in some of them.