In response to a Salmonella outbreak in the USA caused by contaminated peanut butter with more than 700 infected persons, 9 deaths and a recall of more than 3,900 food products, BIOTECON Diagnostics and Merck KGaA participated in an AOAC Emergency Response Validation with their real-time PCR kit for the rapid detection of Salmonella in food samples containing peanut butter. Two validation studies were carried out with peanut butter spiked with different levels of Salmonella serovar Typhimurium. This technical paper shows that the performance of the foodproof® Salmonella Detection Kit in combination with the foodproof® ShortPrep I Kit for DNA extraction is equivalent to the FDA BAM reference method.