Standard procedures to exaruine the contamination of faecal saruples for salmonella are usually focussed towards the isolation of a single salmonella culture. Isolation procedures for salmonella consist of four distinct phases: I) non selective pre-enrichment; 2) selective enrichment; 3) selective isolation and elective growth to produce suspect isolates; 4) confmnation of the isolates. In most cases only one suspect colony is picked out for confmnation. In previous experiments we observed that more than one salmonella strain could be isolated if more than one suspect colony from the sarue saruple was investigated. Growth rates and sensitivity towards selective compounds during isolation procedures could influence the recovery of individual salmonella strains in a saruple. The objective of this study was to detennine whether the recovery rate of different salmonella strains/serotypes, present in one saruple, was equal for all serotypes.