Out-of-control tales from some of the worst cockroach service calls.
Rotten Food = Forgotten Roaches
When a landlord called Betts Pest Control in Wichita, Kan., to report a roach problem, owner Chad Betts was prepared to go in and perform his usual service protocol — but he was definitely not expecting what he discovered. “I noticed roaches around the doors of the refrigerator and freezer,” he describes, noting that the apartment had been empty for some time yet “junk” had been left behind from the previous tenant, including food.
“When I opened up the fridge, it was so full of roaches — you couldn’t have fit another roach in there, and they all dumped out on the floor, thousands of them,” Betts relates.
Apparently, the electricity was cut off when bills weren’t paid, and the leftover food had gone bad. Betts immediately used a spray then shut the refrigerator/freezer doors. “That killed a bunch of them, and then I called the landlord and asked him to remove the rotten food out of the fridge before the second treatment,” he says.
Betts estimates that he could have filled a couple of 5-gallon buckets with the roaches he removed from the site 10 years ago. “Roaches are almost impossible to control if you don’t get sanitation issues resolved,” he says.
At another account, he discovered heaping bowls of cat food placed throughout a home. Litter boxes were overflowing. Water dishes for the pets had splashed all over the floor — and the place looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in years. Because the home was a duplex, the call actually came in from the next-door neighbor. “He was providing the neighbor with an unlimited supply of roaches, and I said, ‘I’ll see what I can do to help you, but until the landlord gets the other tenant to clean up, it’s a lost cause,” Betts relates.
In spite of regular treatments, the roach issue persisted because the tenant could not follow Betts’ suggestion to keep cat food in a sealed container and to not leave the food out 24/7. Eventually, the tenant was evicted. A few weeks later, the roach problem was under control with several thorough treatments.
Help Me Help You
The head chef at a restaurant Carl Braun was servicing enjoyed his bourbon after hours — during the time when Quality Pest Control of Omaha, Neb., performed service. “I wasn’t able to get control — but the bigger problem was, I could not get the message across that unless you keep the area clean, there will always be pests,” he says.
The 4 a.m. service calls when Braun would crawl on hands and knees to place bait felt unproductive. The chef’s attitude was, “I have you, why do I have to do anything?” he says.
Braun decided, “We were not the best company for him. He refused to have any accountability.”
It’s never easy to “fire” a client, but when there’s no cooperation and service is not a success, continuing is a waste. “Sometimes, we need to say, ‘We are not able to help you,’” Braun says.
Drop Ceiling Disaster
The voids above drop ceilings are a common “living room” for roaches. Curtis Rand, vice president of operations at Rose Pest Solutions based in Troy, Mich., knows to look up during an inspection. What he uncovered at a local restaurant during a service call is a constant reminder.
“You typically do not want to see drop ceilings in a restaurant kitchen — so I opened it up and it seemed like 10,000 German cockroaches fell on my head,” he says.
Fortunately, Rand was wearing a zipped-up crawl suit.
Rand and crew spent two-and-a-half hours vacuuming the roaches from the space. “That was a lot of emptying,” he remarks. “Three of us were there and we each had a large HEPA filter vacuum. Each of us emptied those seven or eight times.”
Then, they spent another good hour placing gel bait.
For the next three days in a row, the team returned to the restaurant for follow-up treatment — more vacuuming along with emptying and replacing bait. As the roach infestation dissipated, Rand could identify the source of the problem, and it wasn’t the drop ceiling. “It was the employee locker room where folks were bringing in roaches from the outside,” he says. “You could see them in lunch bags, clothing.”
The restaurant provided employee training on how to look for roaches at home. Rand says, “Once you find the source, it’s not necessarily easier to control but then you can really solve the problem.”
State of the Cockroach Market, Sponsored by Syngenta, Gaining Control
A multi-faceted approach to managing cockroaches allows PMPs to target the treatment to the site.
Chad Moreschi created a tiered, low-impact process for controlling cockroaches for the clients he services in Miami, Fla. “Our mission is to provide the most eco-friendly services possible,” he says, noting that this business focus drives his firm’s service protocols.
First is identification, followed by gel baits. “We use a typical gel bait in places like electrical outlets, cracks and crevices, behind appliances,” he says. “And we use dust.”
Monitoring stations in “hot spots” allows Moreschi to check for activity, and service is performed bi-weekly until the hatched nymphs are eradicated. If necessary, he’ll use a liquid spray to kills adult cockroaches that are actively moving around a site. “But, the goal is to mainly rely on the bait and dust,” he says.
After two weeks, the callback rate is about 5 percent, Moreschi says. He does not rotate cockroach baits and says resistance hasn’t been a problem.
Multi-measure control is a common practice among pest management professionals based on results from PCT’s 2020 State of the Cockroach Market survey. Seventy-four percent of respondents said they use sprayable insecticides and gel baits, while only 9 percent use gel baits alone and 5 percent rely on sprayable insecticides alone.
Of PMPs who offer cockroach control service, 50 percent say their primary control measure is gel baits, while 22 percent said they mostly apply residual pesticides. Just 6 percent say sanitation is the primary control, and no one indicated that glue traps were the No. 1 method of treating roaches. However, for ongoing monitoring, 82 percent use glue traps.
As professional pest management products have evolved, Bery Pannkuk, director of sales at Troy, Mich.-based Rose Pest Solutions, says control certainly has improved. “Years ago, we couldn’t kill a cockroach except with a flyswatter because of the resistance of the chemicals we were all using — and then they invented baits,” he says.
Vacuuming also has become a best practice, Pannkuk adds. “That is positive because the CDC did a study years ago on the allergens from shed skins of cockroaches that become airborne, so vacuuming with a HEPA filter has become more important now,” he says.
“Decluttering is paramount,” Pannkuk adds.
Of course, treatment protocols sometimes depend on the situation. Chad Betts, owner of Betts Pest Control in Wichita, Kan., says bad infestations call for “chemicals first to get a big knockdown.” But if a site is relatively clean, he begins with baits. “If the client follows my protocol for cleaning up, I’ll return within a week or two and bait hot spots.”
Betts also uses dust to get product into voids and cracks and crevices. “The dust is so fine that even if they don’t eat it, they are walking through it and getting exposed to it,” he says.
Insect growth regulators (IGRs) are helpful for breaking the cycle in a bad infestation, Betts adds.
Curtis Rand, vice president of operations at Rose Pest Solutions based in Troy, Mich., says IGRs are helpful in restaurants. “There are only so many places you can spray in a kitchen, so the benefit of IGRs is we can help eliminate the population over time,” he says. “The key is to target the type of treatment you need based on the environment, whether that’s liquid applications, bait, or crack-and-crevice.”
When using any product, Davy Spears, owner of Davy Crockett Pest Control, Pikeville, Ky., emphasizes to his clients that they should not add their own DIY products to the mix. “I let them know that using aerosols will contaminate the baits, too,” he says. “I’ve had a number of customers think that after you do a service, they should spray something on the bait we put down,” he says. “I let them know that using aerosols will contaminate the baits.”
After targeting treatment, control is via maintained ongoing service visits. Rand notes, “The best prevention is a good inspection and follow-up with monitoring.”
Spotlight on Food Safety, Sponsored by Bayer, The High Cost of Trap Checking
Monitoring rodent traps at large commercial facilities comes at a cost, especially if your client doesn’t have a rodent problem.
Say you charge a client $375 a week for various pest control services and you spend 80 percent of your time onsite checking empty traps. The cost of killing one mouse a year? A whopping $15,600, said John Moore, corporate IPM director, Fumigation Service & Supply.
Technician wear-and-tear is another cost. Checking 100 empty traps a week in a facility means you’ve unnecessarily bent over 5,200 times, pointed out veteran PMP Dan Collins. “What food company would do 5,200 tasks with zero results?” he asked.
Remote rodent monitoring reduces pointless trap checking. It also reduces risk of injury since devices can be placed in hard-to-reach areas like drop ceilings (conventional traps require regular ladder or lift use) and under hinged sub-floors, which can pinch fingers. The technology may even help attract new hires, as it emphasizes the industry’s professionalism and growing focus on tech-savvy solutions.
Elevate Collaboration. No longer can technicians tell clients, “Everything’s fine,” said Chris Del Rossi, founder of Food and Drug and the Bug. “Everything’s not fine; there are lots of things to find and communicate to the customer, like conditions they need to correct,” he explained. As such, pest management companies must communicate better with clients. Larger companies may need to create account manager positions to help build these relationships.
Key client stakeholders might work at the plant and elsewhere. “You’ve got to get to know them,” said Joe Barile, technical service lead at Bayer. Besides understanding their food safety concerns, educate them about pest prevention and how you can relieve some of these anxieties by being an important contributor to their food safety program.
Food clients may not understand what preventive service is, or that it’s even an option. “They really rely on the pest control operator to be the expert,” said Gina Kramer, executive director of Savour Food Safety International, which provides auditing, consulting and training to food and beverage manufacturers.
It is the pest control industry’s responsibility, she said, “to educate those in the food and beverage industry as to what other services or alternatives are available” so they can truly implement an IPM system.
Moore agreed. “Being an engaged partner in food safety and brand protection is what the quality and safety people in the food industry are screaming for,” he said.
Don’t forget to build relationships with the people who procure pest management services to help them understand preventive pest management so you can move away from commoditized pricing models.
Likewise, the pest management industry needs to educate auditors, as current audit systems focus on compliance, not prevention. “The food companies are going to have to get away from these goofy audits and rely on science-based systems versus traps every so many feet apart,” said Collins.
Good training remains essential. The relationship between PMPs and clients “can get ruined in a heartbeat by a technician just not paying attention,” said Barile. And documentation, which has always been important in food accounts, has taken on an even higher priority with FSMA.
McCloud Services uses electronic logbooks, which make documentation accessible to multiple layers of personnel. This includes McCloud management, quality and technical teams, as well as the client’s key maintenance, operations, sanitation and management staff. This accessibility provides “extreme benefits” when it comes to monitoring pest trends and problems, said Pat Hottel.
The thoroughness of documentation remains key. “If a program is not a written program, it doesn’t exist; if an event is not recorded and documented, it did not happen,” reminded Steven Sklare of the Food Safety Academy. Be sure to record pest sightings and the corrective actions you’ve taken in response, like what you did to resolve an existing program and eliminate the problem’s root cause.
Far-Reaching Impact. Within the next five years, Barile expects the pest management services provided to food clients to be “radically different” than what most companies are delivering today.
The focus on prevention will influence pest management elsewhere, as well. “I’m seeing similar talk about FSMA-like culture regulation in healthcare,” said Barile. As such, PMPs may see regulatory or client-driven changes to pest services in hospitals, clinics, nursing homes and doctor’s offices.
Barile also anticipates FSMA-like platforms being enacted at schools and for low-income housing. This could be a boon to the industry if PMPs embrace the shift as an opportunity and not view it as another regulation to manage, he said.
FSMA is the industry’s wake-up call, said Moore. “I think with the implementation of FSMA, it is highlighting the fact that our current system and the way we do things is broken,” he said.
Spotlight on Food Safety, Sponsored by Bayer, Lessons from FSMA
The Food Safety Modernization Act changed how we conduct pest management in food processing plants. Experts say these practices can elevate your service offering with other clients, as well.
The Food Safety Modernization Act, enacted in 2011, made sweeping changes to how food manufacturing and processing plants operate to ensure food safety, including how they manage pests.
It shifted the focus from controlling pests to keeping them out of facilities in the first place.
“Preventive control is what it’s all based on,” said Hank Hirsch, president of RK Environmental Services, which specializes in pest management and food safety consulting for food processing facilities. As a result, these clients are more open to doing pest proofing. “They’ll make investments where they may not have in the past,” said Hirsch.
While the stringent regulations of FSMA are specifically geared to food manufacturers, they will likely influence how pest management is carried out in other food and beverage industry operations as well.
So, grain producers, local craft breweries and bakeries are subject to federal inspection under FSMA. Even restaurants, grocery stores and hospitality accounts, which are governed by state and local laws based on the Federal Food Code, a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guideline, may be impacted.
“There is no question that FSMA has had a trickle-down effect on the FDA Food Code and how local and state regulatory bodies enforce their own regulations,” said Steven Sklare, who heads the Food Safety Academy and also operated a commercial pest management company for 25 years.
This means you have to pay attention to FSMA even if you don’t treat food processing plants, said Joe Barile, technical service lead at Bayer. “It’s going to impact everything,” he said.
Customers also understand the importance of FSMA and the essential role pest control plays in protecting the public’s health, food and property. “Pest control is a critical component of any food safety program,” observes Jorge Hernandez, vice president of quality assurance, The Wendy’s Company. “Pests are not only known carriers of food-borne pathogens … but also adulterate food themselves with foreign substances such as insect eggs, larval skins, hairs or waste. As if that wasn’t enough, few things can bring down a food business faster than pests. That’s why it’s importance cannot be underestimated.”
“Pest control is really the basic foundation for food safety,” added Charles Cortellini, vice president of research and development for Massimo Zanetti Beverage USA. “Without being able to control pests from incoming material/ingredients to the actual manufacturing floor, you cannot have any confidence in your food safety program. It really is your first line of defense.”
Whether your clients are food-processing plants, fast food restaurants or food service companies, you can elevate and differentiate your service offering by employing these best practices:
Embrace Real IPM. Under FSMA, food and beverage producers need a robust integrated pest management (IPM) program to fulfill the requirements of its Preventive Controls Rule, enforced by the FDA. “They’re seeing IPM as a critical component in their overall food safety system,” explained Hirsch.
Yet many PMPs spend most of their time at these accounts inspecting traps, fly lights, bait stations and other devices. This is not IPM; it’s pest monitoring, and it doesn’t leave the technicians with much time to do pest prevention.
As the industry continues to evolve, PMPs are shifting from a culture of pesticide application to a culture of diagnostic analysis and targeted treatments, which includes the adoption of innovative new tools like the Bayer Rodent Monitoring System.
As defined by the University of California, “IPM is an ecosystem-based strategy that focuses on long-term prevention of pests or their damage through a combination of techniques” including the elimination of conducive conditions, proper waste management, structural repairs and the targeted use of pesticides as necessary. It is just such an approach that enables PMPs, through the use of IPM techniques, to fulfill the prevention- and risk-based rules of FSMA.
IPM is not one-size-fits-all, but takes into account a facility’s age, construction materials, the building design, pest history, what the facility produces, where supplies come from, how they’re stored and used, and geographic location.
For instance, an urban facility will have pressure from rats and American cockroaches; a rural one will have issues with mice and overwintering pests. “Every food plant, even if they’re identical, is going to have a different risk,” said veteran PMP Dan Collins, who has treated a broad range of food processing facilities.
So, if you are focused only on the trap line, you would be missing the pest activity and conducive conditions that exist away from those traps. “There are so many things in a plant or even in a restaurant or grocery store that we need to train our technicians better to find,” pointed out Chris Del Rossi, founder of Food and Drug and the Bug, which provides pest prevention services to New England-based food and medicine producers.
For some companies the shift from the current pest management system, which emphasizes reaction rather than prevention, will be foundation shaking. “I see a very strong culture change that’s coming to us. We’re going to have to move from a culture of application to a culture of diagnostics,” said Barile.
Spotlight on Food Safety, Sponsored by Bayer, Opportunity Within A Changing Landscape
2020 has been a tumultuous year for our entire planet. COVID-19 has had a drastic impact on both our lives and livelihoods – forcing unprecedented changes in operations and logistics in nearly every industry on a global scale. Now, more than ever before, the world is adjusting to this ‘new normal,’ and there is perhaps a greater focus on food safety, sanitation and public health. And, while COVID-19 is not a foodborne illness, public scrutiny toward food safety and sanitation has never been greater. From farm to table and everywhere in-between, great measures are being taken to promote the safety of our food supply chain – and those who staff it.
One could argue that the sweeping increase in food safety importance we’re seeing today feels fairly similar to 2011, when the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) passed.
FSMA brought widespread operational changes to food safety procedures in large industries like food manufacturing and processing. But these changes were also felt by the hospitality and food service industries – two of the hardest hit in 2020. These businesses were also subject to the same regulatory pressures as their larger food handling counterparts, though at a smaller footprint.
As pest management professionals, you serve as the first line of defense for industries like food service and hospitality – and it goes far beyond pest control. Meeting modern regulatory guidelines means everyone needs to be on the same page and working in collaboration. Reputations, businesses and livelihoods are now more on the line than ever – and communication is key.
The lessons learned from FSMA, when applied to other industries, can be vital to ensuring the success of your business as a pest management professional, as well as the success of your customers.
At Bayer, we believe in opportunity within change.
This is an opportunity to reinvent the way we service our customers and to be inspired by what comes next. We will continue to innovate, dream and explore in our quest to help support an industry that plays such a vital role on the front lines of public health – at a time that feels more important than ever.
Pete Comis Head of Key/National Accounts at Bayer Environmental Science
