Tips for Coping With Common Restaurant Pests

21 Jan Tips for Coping With Common Restaurant Pests

If you own or operate a restaurant, you understand the critical importance of maintaining a clean, healthy, appetizing establishment. Unfortunately, many common pests in the neighborhood may not care about your restaurant’s safety, reputation, or adherence to health codes, forcing you to be vigilant against them.

Rodents, flies, cockroaches, and ants can all invade your kitchen, bathrooms, or dining areas at various times. Fortunately, you can keep these infestations at bay by following some basic preventative practices and engaging professional pest control services as needed. Check out these tips for eliminating these unwanted diners.

For Rodents: Use Traps Instead of Chemicals

Rodents, such as rats and mice, strike dread into the hearts of restaurateurs, and rightly so. These creatures don’t just frighten and disgust customers; they also transmit bacteria that can cause serious diseases, including hantavirus, bubonic plague, tularemia, salmonellosis, leptospirosis, and lymphocytic choriomeningitis.

One challenge in dealing with restaurant rodents lies in the fact that you can’t spray poisons that might handily kill them since these chemicals may prove hazardous to the humans in your establishment as well. Instead of this approach, place baited, spring-loaded traps inside paper bags (so you won’t have to touch the dead rodents).

You don’t always need to kill rodents to get them out of your restaurant. Ask a pest control company about the possibility of installing ultrasonic devices designed to repel these pests and discourage them from returning to your establishment.

For Flies: Clean Drains and Cooking Surfaces

For many people, flies embody the image of filth, disease, and spoilage, all of which can sink your restaurant’s image in a hurry. Like rodents, flies can transmit diseases as they pick up and carry pathogens from contaminated food. Examples of flies that can trouble restaurants include houseflies, fruit flies, and drain flies.

Of these potential invaders, you may find drain flies relatively easy to find and control since they limit most of their activities to your kitchen drains. Use a pipe brush to clean out an inhabited drain, and then add vinegar, baking soda, and boiling water to kill off your drain fly population.

The strategy listed above can also help you get rid of fruit flies attracted to your drains. Otherwise, you’ll find preventative measures your best bet against these pests. Cover your sinks and trash bins, take out the trash regularly, and maintain a routine of cleaning up spills and covering food or drink containers.

Houseflies buzz their way into your restaurant through torn window screens, windows that won’t close all the way, and propped-open doors. Find and fix these gaps in your building to limit such infiltrations. Your pest control team may also add fly repellent around windows, put down sticky traps, or install special lights that repel flies.

For Ants and Cockroaches: Follow the Trails, Protect the Food

Ants and cockroaches thrive in restaurants because of the ready access to food and water. Once these pests get into your restaurant, you may find them hard to locate, at least during regular business hours. Cockroaches in particular will avoid activity and bright lights.

Fortunately, you can figure out how ants enter your restaurant simply by placing little dishes of sugar water at suspected entry points. If you see trails emerging from these dishes, you can follow the trails to your ants’ hiding places. Your pest control provider can then set down bait traps and apply other treatment methods.

Cockroach infestations don’t usually respond to over-the-counter bug sprays, which do a better job of killing one roach at a time. Leave a large-scale infestation to the professionals. In the meantime, keep your food sealed away tightly to keep ants and cockroaches out.

If pests manage to overrun your restaurant despite your best efforts to keep them at bay, turn to Eary Termite & Pest Services. Our skilled technicians can inspect your establishment, pinpoint pest access points, and apply safe, effective treatments as needed in any of our coverage areas.