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RETAIL: the pests’ home sweet home.

You’ll also see higher pest control scores at audit time.

Monitoring

Since pest management is an ongoing process, constantly monitoring your facility for pest activity, implementing operational changes can protect against infestation and help eliminate existing ones.

Indeed, as the pest management professional may visit the facility on a bi-weekly or weekly basis, your personnel on the ground need to be the daily eyes and ears of the IPM programme. Employees should be aware of sanitation issues that affect the programme, and should report any signs of pest activity to minimise costly downtime when reacting to an infestation of any sort.

Documentation

The food safety auditor’s visit can make or break your business. Since pest control can account for up to 20 percent of your total score, it’s imperative that your IPM programme is ready for scrutiny at audit time. Up-to-date pest control documentation is one of the first signs to an auditor that your facility takes pest control seriously.

Important documents include a scope of service, pest activity reports, service reports, corrective action reports, trap layout maps, lists of approved pesticides, pesticide usage reports and applicator licenses.

To ensure that your IPM programme reaches its potential, approach your relationship with your pest management professional as a partnership. Open communication and cooperation between you, your staff and your provider is key. The benefits are fewer headaches, safer products and better audit scores.

Retail

For retailers, the summer heat often translates into unwanted insects and rodents on-site. Such pests impact the bottom line, and are not that easy to get rid of. Once an infestation has occurred, it can be difficult to eliminate. Prevention is by far the easiest and most cost effective way to control pest problems. Pests are attracted to stores and other commercial buildings because these facilities frequently offer food, moisture, shelter and optimal pest temperatures. By removing access to these elements, retailers can make their stores uninviting to insects as well as rodents.

Pests often enter stores through openings around windows and doors and around utility penetrations. Eliminating these unnecessary openings makes the building much less enticing and accessible.

Food processing environments

A pest infestation can put a business’ reputation at risk because nobody wants a foreign body in a product. And pest management in such environments is also very sensitive.

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