Development of microbial exposure assessment is recent and generally suffers of a lack of information and quantitative data. Moreover, microbial growth in food is rarely fully taken into account. An important issue is then to federate interdisciplinary knowledge and methodologies to build an integrated approach towards microbial exposure assessment. The objective of our on-going research project is to build such an approach and to apply it to describe the factors affecting exposure to Listeria monocytogenes in chilled products, specifically in cold-smoked salmon in a first step. The sanitary process is studied from end of production to consumption, including consumption patterns. First results concerning characterization of production process, end-products and strains, thermal evolution of products along the cold chain, development abilities of L. monocytogenes in cold-smoked salmon... are being acquired, with a great care accorded to the characterization of uncertainty and variability. Methodological studies concerning analytical approaches (counting low numbers of stressed cells...) or modelling approaches (predictive microbiology, statistical treatment of variance...) are also in progress.