Common Commercial Kitchen Pests

If you’re the proud owner of a restaurant, you should think three steps ahead about practically everything. This includes pests. A pest infestation can cause you to lose your customers, damage your reputation, and close down your business. Before things get way out of hand, you’d want to contact a commercial pest control West Palm Beach expert to keep these pests out of your kitchen!

What Are the Most Common Commercial Kitchen Pests?

Rodents

Rodents love to hang out in commercial kitchens because of the abundant supply of food and the benign environmental conditions that shelter them from their predators. They can get inside through the holes and cracks in your basement, sewers, and drains. Once mice and rats find their way inside your food establishment, it’ll only be a matter of time before they increase their numbers. 

Since they can’t stop themselves from chewing through anything, they can gnaw your electrical cords and cause potential problems for your appliances. These pests are also highly capable of transmitting deadly diseases that include:

• Toxoplasmosis
• Leptospirosis
• Hantavirus
• Salmonella
• rat-bite fever
• Lyme disease. 

Cockroaches

These crawling pests can manage to squeeze themselves through cracks and crevices around your kitchen. Their usual hiding places include sewers, drains, and inside furnishings and kitchen equipment. Roaches are hardy insects that aren’t picky when it comes to food because they pretty much eat everything they can find in your kitchen. When cockroaches crawl on your cutlery, grill, and dishes, they can transmit various diseases, including:

• Salmonella
• Listeria
• E. coli
• Staphylococcus

Stored Product Insects (SPIs)

SPIs couldn’t resist an abundant supply of stored food. For this reason, you need to keep an eye out for weevils, beetles, mites, and moths that might threaten to infest your grains, seeds, dried fruit, spices, cereals, nuts, and pasta. Although these pests usually infest stored food items that have already been opened, they can also chew through packaging made of plastic, foil, paper, and cardboard. You should throw away the stored food that has been contaminated by SPIs.

Do You Need to Contact A Commercial Pest Control West Palm Beach Professional?

The pest control experts at O’Hara Pest control can help you keep pests out of your commercial kitchen. Contact us today to schedule an appointment.