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Restaurant and commercial food outlets
Many pest situations occur in restaurants, bars and fast food outlets, where the solution may seem unacheiveable.Today's pest manager or controller,working with the restaurant or publican and their staff will acheive a healthy work place. It will also be more attractive to your clients.
Because the business will have such a large volume of people, food preparation, and incoming stock going on, it is easy to over look some of the smaller issues. Although they may seem small, at the time, it is small oversites that more commonly create a pest problem in the first place.
Commercial situations provide such an ideal climate for pest, such as the german cockroach, because these areas are hot and moist. If the situation uses a lot of cooking fat, the moist sticky residue provides an ideal situation. Behind and under cookers and any small tight spaces nearby these pests can hide, they will.
Below is a checklist to help Restauranters, Publicans and any other business owners keep their premises less likely to have a large scale pest invasion.
The female german cockroach carries an egg sack containing 30 to 40 eggs. Once hatched, they can breed within 30 days. Now that never paints a good picture. The egg sack is approximately 10mm long, 4 mm wide and brown to black in colour. If you are able to identify and remove these from incoming stock, do you think you may have less cockroach problems? The picture below indicates colour and what the egg sack looks like.
* Check all in coming stock. Pay particular attention to folds on cardboard boxes, folds on plastic bags, crack and crevices on bottoms of pallets.
* Do not allow staff to bring personal items into the kitchen. Provide an area away from food preparation areas for their personal belongings.
* Provide your kitchen hands with daily and weekly cleaning schedules. If you have more than a couple of staff, divy up and rotate the duties into 15 minute routines. If the cleaning regime is rotated, staff with a better work ethic will notice spots that have been missed. Pay particular attention to under cookers and food preparation areas. Crumbs and traces of oil left on floors or around stoves will only invite problems. Regularly pull out catch trays and check outlets at rear of stoves for excess food or fat waste. These are quite common harbourages if left for too long.
* If you have an area outside you can place bins at night, you would be well advised to do so. Bins should be emptied before your staff leave for home.Washing them out regularly to remove all dirty traces is a must. That extra 10 minutes of wages is worth it. Cover all dry food containers. Cockroaches don't care what they eat. The smallest trace is a meal to them.
* Start with the solution. The solution starts with you. If you have experienced a large scale pest problem and are still dealing with it, chances are a thourough program has not been discussed with you. There are not quick fixes. Your pest manager should be explaining an effective program for you. If price becomes an objection, this is usually overcome when the risk of disease, not to mention lost business is discussed.
* If you or your staff see one cockroach, there are bound to be more that you can't see. Call your pest manager to find the solution.
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