Cockroaches in a Commercial Kitchen

The standard

What Is Actually Being Asked

Food businesses worry that any cockroach finding is fatal. It is not, and understanding what is actually expected makes the whole thing more manageable.

A town-centre kitchen with a yard and a bin store is exposed to pests continually, and that is understood. What is expected is that you have a system: that you are actively looking, that findings get acted on, and that there is a record showing both.

An operator who found something, recorded it, called somebody and documented what was done is in a completely different position from one who has droppings behind the fridge and nothing written down at all.

Photographs on this page are for illustration purposes only.

Where they are

Fixed Equipment and Warm Voids

In a professional kitchen the population is inside the equipment, not on the surfaces. The places that reliably produce something:

• Motor and compressor housings on the fridge, the freezer and the walk-in.
• Under and behind the dishwasher, and its insulation.
• The legs, plinths and undersides of prep benches and counters.
• Behind and beneath the range, and inside the gap between appliances.
• Trunking, conduit and electrical enclosures.
• Boxing around pipework, and the void behind wall cladding.
• The bin store and the yard gully.

Almost all of that is somewhere a deep clean does not reach, which is why a kitchen can be genuinely spotless and still have a population.

Photographs on this page are for illustration purposes only.

Monitoring

The Cheapest Thing You Will Ever Buy

Sticky monitors placed where cockroaches travel — behind and under equipment, along the back of the base units, beside the dishwasher — and checked weekly turn a problem you find at several hundred individuals into one you find at ten.

Write down what was on them including when it is nothing. A run of dated blank checks is evidence you were looking, and it is worth more at an inspection than an assurance that the kitchen is clean.

Somebody has to own it. In practice it works when it is one named person with it on a checklist, and it stops working when it is everybody's job.

If you find something

The First Day

Record it — what, where, when, how many, and a photograph. That record is the single most useful thing you will do.

Then: do not spray anything, because a repellent scatters them through the structure and into neighbouring units. Do not move equipment or boxes to another part of the premises. Isolate any food that could be affected and deal with it properly. Get someone in and agree a time that works around service.

Ask for the treatment record in writing — what was found, what was done, what is outstanding, with dates — and put it in the due-diligence file with your own note. That is the paper trail that matters.

Short answers

Cockroach Questions

Going further

Cockroach Guides