Ensuring food safety is the number one priority in food, including chocolate production. Rigorous quality control measures are in place, but the unique properties of chocolate, such as its high-fat content and low water activity, create an environment in which Salmonella detection is a slow process. 

Chocolate's composition, which includes fats, sugars, and proteins, can interfere with the efficiency of microbiological assays and detection methods. Additionally, contamination in chocolate is rare and when observed at is at very low levels, necessitating highly sensitive testing methods to identify pathogens reliably. 

Detecting any low contamination levels in this complex matrix of chocolate often requires sample preparations and pre-enrichments to allow bacteria to multiply to detectable levels, thereby significantly increasing the time to results and the labor required to run the assays.