CONFECTIONERY giant Cadbury may have to pay millions in fines, costs and compensation after admitting charges of sending chocolate contaminated with salmonella out from its factory at Marlbrook, near Leominster.

The company also faces further charges over working conditions and practices in the factory, which was the centre of a national health alert last summer.

At Birmingham Magistrates Court last Friday, the company pleaded guilty to three food hygiene offences relating to the way the contaminated brands reached shop shelves.

The resulting salmonella outbreak saw more than one million chocolate bars withdrawn from sale. Dozens of people suffered serious food poisoning, many of them young children.

In a statement issued after the hearing, Cadbury expressed its "sincere regret" over the way it first handled the finding of salmonella contamination at the Marlbrook site.

It was six months before the company went public with confirmation of the find, and then only after the Health Protection Agency put out a national warning about a rise in salmonella cases.

This week, Cadbury announced a major overhaul of its confectionery business which will see 7,500 jobs lost and 10 factories shut worldwide over the next five years.

The company told the Hereford Times that it was too soon to say what this might mean for the Marlbrook factory which supplied the chocolate crumb from which the contaminated bars were made.

Since the salmonella scare, Cadbury says it has invested heavily in better production processes at the plant as part of a £20 million programme to improve all its UK sites.

The new charges the company faces are based on an environmental health investigation into the Marlbrook plant made by Herefordshire Council. Herefordshire magistrates are due to hear these charges on July 24.

All the charges - punishable by unlimited fines - follow one of the biggest and most complex investigations into food hygiene offences ever undertaken in the UK and run, over the past year, as a joint operation by Herefordshire Council and Birmingham City Council, with expert input from the Food Standards Agency.

The charges Cadbury admitted last Friday were brought by Birmingham City Council and cover the corporate offences the Birmingham-based company committed in putting contaminated chocolate on the market.

Details of how this happened were not outlined during the brief hearing.

Anthony Scrivener QC, for Cadbury, told the court that the company accepted responsibility for the outbreak and would plead guilty to the three food hygiene charges it faced on the day. Magistrates sent the case to Birmingham Crown Court for sentence on July 13.

The brand recall alone cost Cadbury around £30 million. Civil actions for compensation, filed by, or on behalf, of those made ill, may also follow Friday's admissions. One national firm of solicitors has already said it is investigating the pursuit of such claims.

The company statement IN a statement issued on the day of Friday's hearing, Cadbury said it got it wrong over the way it first handled the finding of salmonella contamination at the Marlbrook plant in January last year.

The statement said: "Mistakenly, we (the company) did not believe that there was a threat to health and thus any requirement to report the incident to the authorities - we accept this approach was incorrect.

"Quality has always been at the heart of our business, but the process we followed in the UK in this instance was unacceptable. We have apologised for this and do so again today. Since last year more than £20 million has been spent in the UK on new and rigorous quality control procedures.

"The processes that led to this failure ceased from June last year and will never be re-instated.

"We sincerely regret this lapse and are focused on ensuring that this can never happen again.

"A major review has taken place of our quality, health and safety procedures globally to learn lessons and ensure that our consumers can rely on the highest levels of processes and standards wherever we operate."