Pest control tips for your restaurant

Creepy crawlies, furry fiends, invading insects – whatever you call them, pests can ruin your venue’s reputation. Here, you’ll learn more about the most common pests in restaurants and tips to prevent a full-blown infestation. Thanks to tools like a restaurant cleaning checklist and a pest control report, your venue can run smoothly, cleanly, and safely.

What are a restaurant kitchen’s seven most common pests?

• Cockroaches
• Rodents
• Flies
• Ants
• Stored product pests (beetles, moths, and weevils)
• Pantry pests
• Silverfish

Why is pest control important?

Despite what the film Ratatouille may have you believe, a kitchen swarming with rats will not produce magical results. Pest control keeps your venue clean and safe for both staff and customers.

Beyond keeping the venue safe and clean, pest control can also save you money. Loss due to pests can significantly eat into your budget – pardon the pun.

Putting time and effort into preventative measures, like working with pest control inspection experts, can save your venue a lot of money in the long run.

How to prevent an infestation

Organize regular pest control inspections

They say the best offence is a good defence. Make sure you get qualified pest control professionals to conduct a thorough inspection every three months. However, different venues have different levels of pest control risks. If your venue produces and sells foods containing a lot of raw ingredients or creates food waste, you may need more frequent inspections. It’s best to speak to the pest control professional during the inspection to sort this inspection frequency out.

Digitize your venue’s pest control report

Traditional grotty paper and pen reports and restaurant cleaning checklists have their drawbacks. For starters, most multi-location venues have different risks when it comes to pests. Some may be near waterways and others may be in densely populated areas. A stock-standard pest control report may not cater to each location’s needs.

Digital-based checklists allow managers to craft a template, access a standard report, and alter it quickly to meet their venue’s needs. A digital report template is far easier to distribute amongst a wider team than having to redraft, print, and mail paper templates. Trust us, if you’re a manager who has a thousand things on at the same time, this digitization simplifies things immensely.

Train your staff

Provide comprehensive training to staff on proper sanitation practices and pest awareness to empower them to promptly identify and address potential pest issues. If you have difficulty training your staff, why not consider implementing workforce training software? This way, you can set the standards each employee must complete, which they can complete anytime, anywhere.

Properly store your food

This may come as no surprise, but ensuring you store, preserve, and secure your venue’s inventory and stock helps prevent pests from feasting upon it. If food is insecurely stored, beetles and mice can compromise conventional packaging. 

Establish standards your staff must uphold regarding food storage. These can include hard dates for stock rotation or storage requirement checks like transferring inventory from packaging to airtight containers. Then, make sure these standards or benchmarks are readily available as a guide or for review. For example, a digital checklist for incoming orders can be easily reviewed and enacted upon.

Avoid unnecessary food spoilage

Food spoilage is one of the worst things that can happen to a venue. The biggest culprit is usually a malfunctioning refrigeration unit. Wireless temperature monitoring of your venue’s refrigeration or freezer units can help tackle this issue before it becomes too severe. You can remotely track the temperature and humidity of all your equipment. Benefit from instant SMS alerts the moment a temperature deviates from the appropriate range, even during a power failure.

This technology can help safeguard the integrity of your inventory and stock, thus preventing the potential for spoilage and attracting unwanted visitors to the kitchen. Nobody wants to open the kitchen’s fridge or freezer to be greeted with a foul smell and a swarm of flies.

Operandio can help you keep pests at bay

Operandio’s systemized cleaning practices simplify pest control for even the busiest managers. Our digital-based restaurant cleaning checklists can set correct cleaning and pest control standards for all staff, so you don’t have to. Book your free demo today.