Most commercial kitchens have clear policies and procedures in place to keep pests out and stop infestations before they cause serious damage. Usually this involves routine checking of pantries and storage areas for signs of rodent or insect pests, including droppings, damaged packaging, or even live or dead bugs.
While it’s important to thoroughly check for these obvious signs, here’s a few more tips to protect your commercial kitchen that you may not have thought of, courtesy of Northern Colorado’s own Bug Control Specialist.
Rigorously Enforce Sanitation Procedures
Again, this sounds like an obvious tip, but it has to be drilled into every single kitchen employee that this is an incredibly important daily task. Of course, we’re here for pest control, but we’d rather not be! We know that getting shut down or paying to remove pests or mitigate pest damage is expensive, and it’s always better to avoid these costs whenever possible.
Even if you have well-established policies, your employees need to be reliable eyes and ears to catch and mitigate pest problems before they get worse. Every daily inspection must be thorough; your staff can’t just give a quick glance around the pantry shelves or behind the ovens, check a couple boxes, and consider it done—they need to closely examine food, packaging, and other vulnerable areas in the kitchen, every single day.
Watch for Water
Most restaurants understandably focus on their kitchens as the most vulnerable areas for pest infestation, but knowing more about pest ecology and behavior can illuminate other potential trouble spots, too.
It’s not just food, for example. Consider any and all places where water or moisture may build up, including bars, utility sinks or closets, restrooms, floor drains, and self-serve beverage stations (soda fountains). Insects, especially, gravitate toward moist environments, whereas rodents prefer food sources, warmth, and shelter.
Even if your kitchen is locked down, once pests find their way inside, they will migrate to better sources of food and water, which of course will eventually lead to your kitchen.
To make sure excess moisture isn’t attracting pests, do the following:
- Check and promptly repair any leaking pipes in restrooms and sinks
- Clean and sanitize water or beverage stations regularly. This will prevent pooling of water and sugary beverages that can attract fruit flies or other insects and pests.
- Make sure water isn’t pooling in the basement or any other rooms
- Keep floor drains clear of food debris and moisture; check them regularly for flies and other insects.
- Immediately dry and sanitize any areas that accumulate excessive water
- Run a commercial-strength dehumidifier
- Seal any old or faulty barriers at entry points and check for tiny holes in baseboards where water (and rodents or insects) may enter.
Taking the extra time to identify all possible areas where excess moisture, and therefore pests, may be present is well worth it. Make it a regular, weekly task to check all places that might collect extra moisture.
Inspect Food Deliveries
Even if you take every precaution inside your restaurant, what’s to stop a mouse or roach from hopping out of a delivery truck and right into your building? When taking deliveries, instruct your staff to visually inspect all packaging to make sure no signs of pests are present. If possible, be sure to also inspect the interior of the truck to make sure there are no flies or other potential signs of pests.
Keep Waste Areas Clean
Nothing is more attractive to insect or rodent pests than overflowing trash bins, pools of leaking garbage water, and excess garbage strewn about the ground. Again, even if your interior policies are top-notch and rigorously followed, pests may still be in close proximity if you don’t monitor and keep up with cleaning your exterior waste area.
Most properties have some kind of steel enclosure for their garbage bins, so make sure that area is spotless and free of standing water. Make sure all trash bags are properly sealed before they’re taken out, so they don’t burst open and create habitat for insects and rodents in the trash unit. Above all, build a consistent routine for this space into your daily and weekly procedures. This area isn’t always the center of your operation’s focus, so it can get overlooked as the trash (and pests) pile up.
Don’t Forget the Roof
It’s not uncommon for birds to nest within the roof of any commercial building, restaurant or not. If left unchecked, bird populations can produce large amounts of droppings that can actually be corrosive to paint and other finishes. This damage can be costly to repair; however, the presence of birds can become more than a nuisance for commercial kitchens—it could result in food contamination, as birds carry dozens of diseases known to be harmful to humans. These include E. coli, salmonella, and even more serious ones like encephalitis.
Keep everyone safe by routinely inspecting roofing, patching up potential entry points, and promptly cleaning up any droppings to avoid damage and disease spread.
When the Best Defenses Fail, Call Bug Control Specialist
Even if you’ve followed all these tips, we all know that even the best laid plans fail from time to time. If they do, and you find possible evidence of pests in your business kitchen, don’t freak out. Call Bug Control Specialist, Northern Colorado’s best line of defense against commercial pest problems. Our safe, effective, and sustainable pest control techniques will rid your kitchen of all signs of pests, and we’ll help you keep them out with in-depth preventative tips tailored to your space. Contact us today!