Pest Control Management

Food safety in manufacturing, retail, and food service depends on numerous critical control points. Pest control management is one of them. The variety of pests that food-related companies need to be aware of, monitor, and control is vast. And the tools they use to do this are becoming more sophisticated and automated all the time.

Tolerances are getting tighter all the time, too. Twenty-five years ago, for instance, to have 100 cockroaches spread throughout a food plant did not raise eyebrows. Today, even discovering one cockroach is taken very seriously. That is because cockroaches, flies, and other insects, by walking through contaminated areas, the worst being sewage, can introduce streptococcus, molds, salmonella, yeasts, clostridia, and a host of other bacteria into the food. Meanwhile, rats bite 45,000 people in the US each year and can carry an enormous array of harmful infectious bacteria and diseases, including salmonella, trichinosis, murine typhus, plague, leptospirosis, and other disease-causing pathogens. But the list goes on. Other unwanted guests include spiders, snakes, mice, mosquitoes, raccoons, wolves, birds, fruit flies, snails, slugs, and slugs, bats, you name it.

Pest Prevention

In the past, pest control relied more on treatment than it did on prevention. When pests were detected in a food manufacturing environment or other facilities, the most common remedy was using the appropriate type of spray, pesticide, or poisoned bait to eliminate them. Today, however, because of increased toxicity concerns in and around food, the greatest focus is on prevention and, failing that, mechanical traps.

By making sure a food facility is sufficiently sealed—for instance making sure foundation walls are not cracked, and that doors and windows and other areas of potential entry are secure—pests cannot get in so controlling them with chemicals, pesticides, adhesive strips, traps, and other things is minimized.

Pest Management Control Programs

Food facilities nowadays are expected to have effective pest management control systems in place that are auditable and backed up with comprehensive electronic inspection hardware and software. These programs are an important part of HACCP, and annually audited food safety certification programs such as GFSI, BRC, IFS, and others. The success of a program rides heavily on the quality and knowledge of pest management service technicians. Whether in-house or outsourced, specialists must be properly trained in trap maintenance, data collection, and inspections, monitoring systems, troubleshooting, external bate stations for rodents, mechanical traps, snap traps, glue boards, insect light traps, use of pheromones, and, as a last resort, chemicals.

Chemicals are still a very important part of a pest control management system or plan. There is a tremendous assortment of them available, more so in the US than Canada, where more restrictions apply, especially in food environments. But things are tightening up in the US as well.