Almost nobody in a commercial kitchen rings me about cockroaches. They ring me about what the cockroach cost them.
A café in the Wollongong CBD called me on a Saturday because a customer had got a clear phone photo of one on the wall beside the coffee machine at about nine in the morning and put it straight onto a local Facebook page. By lunchtime there were a few hundred comments underneath it and the owner was standing out the back on the phone to me instead of running her floor. She'd have paid me three times my quote that morning and we both knew it.
That's the real stake, and it's different depending on what you run. A café loses the room's opinion of it and doesn't get it back for a season. A club or a pub gets it raised in front of the board. An aged care kitchen or a childcare centre has a compliance officer asking for records, and "we're onto it" isn't an answer there. A food truck can lose its permit for the run of an event. The fine, if one ever comes, is usually the smallest number in the whole business.
The thing is, she hadn't been careless. The kitchen was immaculate: stainless polished, floor mopped, cool room tidy, and she was genuinely house-proud about it. She'd seen "the odd one" at close for a few weeks and assumed they were wandering in from the laneway bins.
It took about twenty minutes to find them. Under-bench fridge, pulled out, and the warm gap behind the compressor housing was speckled with what looked like ground pepper. Glued to the underside of the bench lip above it, where a cloth has never once reached, a row of egg cases. Nine or ten, most already hatched and open along the seam. They'd been living there permanently and coming out after the lights went off, which is why she'd only ever seen strays.
That's nearly every commercial job I go to. The premises look fine. The problem is behind something.
What the inspector is actually looking at
Council environmental health officers don't wander around hoping to spot a cockroach on the floor. They pull things out and they look underneath: behind and under the fridges and the dishwasher, under the hand basin, along the skirting behind the prep bench, inside the dry store, in the gap where the cool room panel meets the wall. They check the door seals and the gaps under the back door. They look at where you keep the bins.
Then they ask for the pest reports.
Under the Food Standards Code, a food business has to do what it reasonably can to keep pests out, which is clause 24 of Standard 3.2.2. Food Standards Australia New Zealand publishes a plain guide to pest control obligations for food businesses that's short and worth having read before an officer turns up rather than after. The practical reading of it: an inspector wants to see that you have a system, not that you got lucky.
That means dated service reports showing what was found, what was used, and what the technician told you to fix. It means evidence you actioned the recommendations, because a report saying "gap under rear door needs sealing" sitting unactioned for three visits is worse than no report at all. And it means the treatment was done by someone holding a current pest management technician licence from the NSW EPA.
Plenty of small operators are doing the work and have nothing on paper to show for it. That's a fail waiting to happen for no good reason.
German cockroaches are a different animal
Worth separating, because most people lump all cockroaches together and they shouldn't.
The big ones you see in the laneway and occasionally scuttling across the floor at night are usually American cockroaches, coming up from a drain or in under a door. Annoying, unhygienic, not usually a structural problem.
German cockroaches are the commercial kitchen problem. Small, tan, two dark stripes behind the head, and they never leave. They live inside the equipment: the motor housing of the fridge, the underside of the coffee machine, inside the hinge of a stainless door, behind the splashback, in the cardboard boxes stacked in the dry store. They want warm, tight and close to food, and a kitchen gives them all three around the clock.
The female carries her egg case with her until it's nearly ready to hatch, which is why spraying the ones you can see is such poor value. She's not on the floor. She's in a gap two millimetres wide with thirty-odd eggs on board. Egg to breeding adult runs somewhere around six to eight weeks in a warm kitchen, faster if the room never cools down overnight, so a population you ignore in August is a genuinely different problem by October.
The same logic as why cockroaches keep coming back in houses, except a kitchen runs hotter and never really shuts.
Why we bait rather than spray in a food area
There's a reason a commercial treatment looks less dramatic than people expect.
Spraying a residual across a kitchen is the wrong tool. It puts product on surfaces that get cleaned, and a lot of German cockroach populations around here are behaviourally wary of freshly sprayed surfaces anyway, so you scatter them into new harbourage and now they're in three rooms instead of one. Worse, in a food area the product can't go anywhere near food contact surfaces, which is most of the room.
So it's gel bait, placed in the cracks and voids and inside the equipment where they actually live, plus insect growth regulator so the next generation doesn't reach breeding age, plus monitors so we can see what's happening between visits rather than guessing. Everything goes where pesticide and dead insects can't fall onto food or a prep surface, which is exactly what the Code asks for and also just sensible.
One thing that catches people: if you've had a bloke in spraying surface product every month, or the staff have been hitting them with a supermarket can, the bait works slower to start with. They've learnt to avoid treated surfaces. Tell us what's been used before and we'll plan around it.
We also work after close for most food premises. Nobody wants a technician on their hands and knees behind the pass at midday service, and the cockroaches are up at night anyway.
Strip shops and shared roof voids
The other Illawarra pattern worth naming, especially in the older strips through Corrimal, Thirroul, Warrawong and the Wollongong CBD blocks.
Six shops in a row, one continuous roof void, no fire separation worth speaking of, and a shared bin area out the back. The bakery treats. The takeaway next door doesn't, because they've had no complaints. The rats and the cockroaches simply move next door for a fortnight and come home when it's over.
If you're a tenant in a strip and you're doing everything right and still getting hit, the problem is usually two doors down or in the common bin bay. That's a conversation with the landlord or the strata manager, and it's one worth having in writing. We service a fair few whole buildings for exactly this reason, because treating one unit in a shared structure is money spent on a temporary result. The rodent side of it is even more clear-cut than the insects, since rats will run a whole terrace of roof voids as one territory.
Get it sorted in August
The next eight weeks are the cheap window.
Trade is quiet, the kitchen isn't running flat out, and there's time to pull the fridges out and do it properly instead of squeezing a technician in between services. More to the point, cockroach numbers are still low. A kitchen with a small German population right now is a two-visit job. The same kitchen in late November, after twelve weeks of warm nights and heavy trade, is a monthly program for a season and a much less pleasant conversation if an inspector arrives in the middle of it.
Same goes for the rodents, which start moving out of the roof voids and back down into bin rooms as it warms up.
If you run a café, a club, an aged care kitchen, a food truck or a strip of tenanted shops, here's what commercial servicing with us involves, or have a look at the general pest treatment if it's a small premises without a food licence. Otherwise ring us and describe the site, and we'll tell you honestly whether you need a program or one visit.
Need a hand with this in your home? Get a free quote or call 0430 007 651.