If you’ve wondered whether your food processing facility could benefit from professional commercial rodent control, here’s a quick quiz to help you decide.
Simply answer "yes" or "no" to the following questions:
- Are you protective of your business reputation?
- Is product safety a priority for you?
- Do you strive to create a safe, hygienic and pleasant working environment?
- Do you try to avoid interruptions to your facility’s operations schedule?
- Do you work to maintain and improve productivity and efficiency standards?
- Are you subject to local health code, FDA, USDA or other agency compliance regulations?
- Is avoiding mandatory shutdowns, work interruptions and loss of profit important to you?
- Is facility cleanliness important to you?
- Would you like to protect against product loss?
If you answered “yes” to one or more of these questions, a commercial rodent control plan is probably a good idea for your facility. That’s because a rodent infestation can adversely affect many of the things food processing facility owners and managers care about, including cleanliness, sanitation, worker safety, productivity, regulatory compliance, business reputation and more.
Rodents can:
- Enter buildings through doorways and very small cracks and holes as small as the size of a quarter (rats) or dime (mouse)
- Carry pathogens that may cause disease
- Multiply rapidly when sufficient food, water and harborage is available
- Leave behind unsanitary droppings that can contaminate equipment and products
- Gnaw, feed and breed in food processing locations, sometimes causing wire damage that can spark electrical fires
- Pose threats to employee health and safety in a food processing facility
- Frighten employees and visitors and damage your business reputation
- Generate unpleasant odors
- Cause damage that may be expensive to repair, cutting into business profits
Controlling Rodents in a Food Plant
It’s not easy to control rodent infestations. It’s recommended that you hire a commercial pest control company like Terminix® that specializes in food processing facilities to employ traps, baits and physical barriers specifically designed to help get rid of existing rodents and prevent future rodent entry. Traps and baits may be used for rodent removal. Physical barriers and exclusion techniques help address and correct the conditions that enabled rodents to gain entry in the first place. These are some of the methods that Terminix may use.
Terminix professionals know how to execute effective rodent control measures in food processing facilities. As part of an Integrated Pest Management (IPM) program, education is also available for food processing management and staff to help curb rodent populations through proven preventive measures, such as securing trash receptacles and dumpster lids, removing tall weeds and grass from around structures and addressing other issues and conditions that can attract rodents.
To help protect your food processing facility from rodents and other undesirable pest threats, request a free estimate today. Let Terminix Commercial focus on controlling pests while you focus on operating your facility as productively, efficiently and profitably as possible.
