Ground Floor: The man is well aware that the way to my heart is through a bar of chocolate. Nothing new there, really. There have been millions of studies in which women confess to their weakness for chocolate and its many benefits.

Dark chocolate increases your levels of HDL (good) cholesterol as well as releasing about 400 different chemicals into your body. These include serotonin, which is a mood enhancer. I know that a gorgeous chocolate enhances my mood beyond measure and the man has had plenty of experience in sorting that one out over the years.

However, releasing salmonella into my body isn't something that I'm looking for from my favourite treat. And the fact that Cadbury has recently had to recall one million bars off the shelves because it found traces of salmonella in them is not something that I wanted to hear.

Even less did I want to discover that the salmonella traces date back to a problem with a leaky factory pipe last January, but that the bosses at Cadbury didn't think that it was worth mentioning to anyone. Even now, in recalling the products, the company insists that the move is "purely precautionary".

Purely precautionary would have been doing something about it back in January. The current recall isn't precautionary. It's slamming a stable door after the horse has not only bolted but done a lap of the track.

Like many big companies, Cadbury - part of the Cadbury Schweppes group - has a corporate responsibility programme dealing with society and the environment. It points to its 12-point programme addressing consumer health concerns such as obesity and refers to its development of low-calorie products; its smaller single-serving portion sizes, its policy of not selling products in primary schools and its involvement in physical education programmes as well as involvement in corporate responsibility awards.

So far so laudable - so what on earth were they thinking of when they allowed salmonella infected product onto the shelves?

Years ago, I went to see the movie Jaws in the cinema. I remember being horrified (though understanding that it was necessary to the plot) when the Roy Scheider character didn't close the beach as a safety precaution in the face of corporate pressure. I wanted to shout out that the bad publicity from having the punters eaten would surely outweigh the precautionary measure of closing the beach. But the apparently insignificant possibility of a shark attack was weighed up against the definitely lost tourist trade and it was a no-contest situation. I understand the reluctance of any corporation to close down part of its operations, recall a product or be pro-active on a bad news story. But I wonder how the Cadbury board decided that the traces of salmonella were so small as to provide no real threat to their consumers.

Surely someone must have pointed out that it would only take one person to get sick to leave them with a PR nightmare? It appears that there has been an increase in the number of people (children in particular) presenting with salmonella poisoning in certain areas of the UK. And the strain is similar to that found in the chocolate. So their PR people are now in overdrive telling us about the precautionary measures.

The very worst thing a company can do is to have a PR disaster resulting from a wrong decision. It takes years to build up a brand and it can be destroyed in an instant.

Remember Gerald Ratner and his "our products are crap" joke? Ratner had taken the family business from a company with 130 stores and sales of £13 million to one of 25,000 stores and profits of £121 million before it all went horribly wrong in the space of one sentence. The result was £500 million wiped off the company's value and a transformation from a profitable situation to one of £122 million loss.

No company can get through life without some bad PR, but in days of instant communication, it needs to be able to deal with problems quickly and effectively. And it needs to treat its customers with respect. However, it sometimes seems directors - treated with deference within the company - forget their customers don't see them in the same light.

The "we know best" mentality isn't one that works when you have to deal with anxious consumers. It has to be a million times better for a company to make a pre-emptive strike and be as honest as possible with its customers.

A chastened company, admitting to an error and promising that they've taken steps to ensure that it won't happen again, will reap the rewards. An arrogant company, suggesting that they considered the problem but didn't think it worth dealing with, will not find the public very sympathetic.

Todd Stitzer, chief executive of Cadbury Schweppes, had only recently reported that the company expected growth at the upper end of the goal range for 2006. Last year's results were good with revenue growth up 6.3 per cent and profit before tax up 12 per cent. Might yet have to review those numbers. It depends on how customers react.

Naturally, they're angry but relatively mollified by the recall. Chocolate isn't like jewellery and the company hasn't done a Ratner. The shares have taken a bit of a hit, but nothing worse than that has been happening in the market over the past couple of weeks anyway. Investors will ride out the storm.

Nevertheless, confidence in the brand has been shaken. And it's not because something bad happened - problems always occur. It's because the directors sat around and discussed it and decided that the profitability trade off was probably worth a few people getting a bit sick - and that's always the wrong decision.

www.sheilaoflanagan.com