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Cadbury management had decided the level of contamination did not warrant any further action. “The level we found was so incredibly low that we decided there was no need to inform the FSA,” said a spokesman.

This decision has amazed experts who point to a wealth of scientific evidence about the dangers of salmonella in chocolate, even at trace levels.

Malcolm Kane, former head of food safety at Sainsbury, who now runs Cambridge Food Control, a consultancy, said: “Food contamination outbreaks should be dealt with under the Global Food Standard rules, laid down for food manufacturers and retailers by the British Retail Consortium.

“These say that as soon as salmonella was detected the company should have instituted a crisis management procedure, including recalls of any potentially hazardous products and warning relevant authorities.”

Cadbury has confirmed that it initiated no such procedures. Instead managers decided informally that the salmonella levels were too low to be a threat and carried on production.

From January until last week, the Cadbury factory produced up to 40,000 tons of chocolate crumb. At the same time, the HPA was becoming increasingly concerned by a sudden increase in the number of people contracting salmonella montevideo.

Last year there were 14 cases, mostly in people who had just returned from abroad. In the four months to June, however, doctors reported more than 50 cases.

HPA statisticians investigating the source of the infection began to suspect that it might be chocolate as many of the patients were children.

They also trawled through their own files. Earlier this month they found the samples sent to them by Cadbury’s private laboratory.

When they carried out molecular analyses of the two sets of samples — Cadbury’s and those taken from victims of the infection — they found they were the same.

The FSA said: “The HPA asked the private lab to identify their client but it refused, citing confidentiality. The HPA then came to us. We contacted the lab, which went back to the client, and Cadbury called us on Monday.”

For Cadbury, the consequences of the delays could be damaging to its reputation and its business. The FSA has ordered it to withdraw 1m chocolate bars, which must all be destroyed. They include popular products such as the eight-chunk and the 1kg Dairy Milk bars, and the Dairy Milk Caramel and Turkish bars.

The company is also likely to face prosecution by Herefordshire council’s environmental standards department, whose officers are understood to be angry at not being informed about the contamination when it was first detected in January. They had last inspected the factory in autumn 2005.

Food safety experts say Cadbury cannot claim to have been unaware of the risk from salmonella in chocolate, as the bacterium is a known contaminant throughout the early parts of the production process.

Professor Hugh Pennington, president of the Society of General Microbiology, said: “Salmonella is a dangerous bug and Cadbury is wrong to say that low levels do not matter. The acceptable level of salmonella in food is zero.”

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