Marlbrook

If that [laughs] sounds like it shouldn't fit in one episode, stick around because believe it or not, it does, and it's one of the stranger paths a business recovery has ever taken.

So early in 2006, a laboratory technician somewhere in the English Midlands is looking at test results from a sample sent over from a chocolate factory in Marlbrook.

Marlbrook is near the town of Leominster in England.

A pipe at the plant has been leaking quietly for a while, carrying raw ingredients through part of the production line without anyone noticing.

The results come back confirming what nobody in the company wanted to see: a rare strain of salmonella, which is present in products that the company's already made and has put onto store shelves across the country, is probably sitting in kitchen cupboards and shopping bags with no warning label anywhere in sight.

It was built on a century-old promise of quality baked right into its advertising, glasses of creamy milk pouring into the chocolate with every commercial.

It was a reliable, familiar treat parents handed to their kids without ever thinking twice about it.

Underneath that success, though, something had gone quietly wrong at the company's Marlbrook plant.