Contamination of foodborne in food product is the major concern in food industry. To ensure safety of finished product, it is necessary to control the cleanliness of the production environment. The most common technique used for hygiene monitoring in a processing line is swabbing technique. The purpose of this study is to identify several factors (types of swab, surface and bacteria) which affect swab efficiency when using this technique to inspect foodborne pathogen available on surfaces. Four types of swab including cotton, polyesterurethane form (PU foam), sponge and gauze swab were used to recover pathogens (Salmonella Typhimurium, Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli and Listeria monocytogenes from stainless steel and polyesterurethane (old and new) coupons. Efficiency of bacterial releasing from different swab type was evaluated, bacterial suspension (5 log CFU/ml) was directly inoculated in each swab type and observed amount of bacteria released. Sponge, PU foam and gauze swab show higher releasing efficiency (average range of 4 pathogens: 94.09-99.34%) comparing to cotton swab (80.76-87.17%). The efficiency of each swab to recover bacteria from each surface condition (wet and dry surfaces) was investigated Swabbing on a wet surface using sponge (80.12-98.19%), PU foam (87.30-98.54%) and gauze (77.93-100.78%) yield no significant difference of bacterial recovery efficiency which is considered to be higher than cotton swab (79.001-92.49%). In addition, swabbing on dry surface using sponge shows the highest bacterial recovery efficiency (52.31-78.40%), while cotton swab exhibit the lowest bacterial recovery (33.85-63.31%) Moreover, swabbing on dry surface condition decreased bacterial recovery efficiency of all swab types to 33.85-78.40%. The efficiency of each swab to recover bacterial biofilm from surface was also determined. Sponge (47.68-54.97%) and PU foam (48.29-55.16%) show higher percentage recovery of bacterial biofilm than cotton (45.10-50.09%) and gauze swab (48.29-55.16%) The results of this study clearly show that swab and surface types with dry/wet surface condition can affect bacterial recovery efficiency. Therefore, choosing appropriate type of swab related to conditions of surface can increase bacterial recovery efficiency from surface and help food industry to get more actual contamination situation in processing line. Higher efficiency of swab can help food industry to take immediate and appropriate corrective action in order to prevent product contamination.