If you own a restaurant, rodents can be your worst enemy. Not only can they contaminate your food, but if a customer were to spot one, the negative publicity could be devastating.
A rodent defense strategy should always be front of mind.
How to keep your restaurant rodent free?
One of the first things you should do is seal off all entrances into the restaurant. Follow these simple steps:
Step #1: Walk around the perimeter of the restaurant and look for any potential entrances as small as the size of a dime. Mice can fit through holes the size of a dime and rats can fit through holes the size of a quarter.
Step #2: If you identify any potential entrances in Step #1, block off any entrances with Xcluder Steel Wool. Rodents cannot chew through steel.
Step #3: Take a close look at any doors that lead to the outside and ensure there are no gaps underneath. If you spot a gap, block it off by installing an Xcluder Door Sweep.
Once these steps have been completed, your next focus should be ensuring that no rodents are already inside of your restaurant.
It is important that you don’t have much clutter in the back of your restaurant and if anything, put as much as you can on movable shelves. Seville Classics makes a Commercial Grade Steel Wire Shelving that would be ideal to stock your restaurant with. Rodents love to hang out in dark, concealed places and if you have everything off the ground, it will take away any potential shelter that the rodents are utilizing.
Also, if you are able to see the ground it will be much easier to spot rodent droppings. The quicker you can spot a presence of rodents in your restaurant, the quicker you can resolve.
If you spot rodent droppings, you need to take action asap. This is super important in keeping a rodent free restaurant.
The first thing you need to do is identify the path that the rodents are taking. Rodents always prefer to travel along a vertical surface (i.e. like a wall). Look for the closest wall to where you found the rodent droppings and then walk along it a little bit until you spot the next set of poops. That will tell you what direction they are traveling and will indicate where you need to place the traps.
Once the travel path has been identified, place Tomcat Rat Snap Traps flush against the wall. I would suggest baiting with peanut butter.
I would continue to do this until you catch multiple vermin and detect no more signs of new rodent droppings. When you clean up the dead rodents and droppings it is important that you are very careful. Please review: How to Dispose of Dead Rodents and How to Clean Rodent Droppings.
I hope that this article has been helpful and has given you some ideas to rodent proof your restaurant. If you have any questions/comments, please leave them below.
Thank you!!
RKD
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