Restaurants and kitchens

A commercial kitchen is the hardest room we work in, and the reason is simple: it offers pests warmth, water and food continuously, and it cannot be closed while we deal with them. Everything below follows from that.

Cockroaches are the dominant problem, and in kitchens it is usually the German cockroach rather than the larger species people notice outdoors. They live in the warm, tight gaps that a kitchen is full of: behind and beneath equipment, inside motor housings, in the hollow legs of tables, behind splashbacks and in the gap between two units that were never quite pushed together. A population can rebuild from a small number of survivors, so a treatment that reduces what you can see without reaching those spaces buys a few weeks.

We work with gel and an insect growth regulator placed directly into those voids and hinges, not sprayed across preparation surfaces. That matters for two reasons. It puts the treatment where the insects actually are, and it means the kitchen does not need stripping out or standing empty. Treated areas are ready for normal use once the application has dried.

Flies are the second issue and the one most often treated backwards. Killing adult flies deals with the flies in the room and not with whatever is producing them, which is usually drainage, a bin area, a floor gully, or organic material somewhere it should not be. We look for the source first. Electric fly killers and traps then hold a situation that is already improving, rather than fighting one that is not.

Rodents follow the waste. Bin stores close to a kitchen door, deliveries left in a rear yard and gaps under roller shutters are the usual routes in, and where that is the case we would rather close the route than commit you to baiting indefinitely.

On scheduling, we work around service rather than against it. Most restaurant visits happen before opening, after closing or in the gap between lunch and dinner, and we will fit to whichever suits your kitchen. If you have an environmental health visit coming, say so when you book, because it changes what is worth doing first.

We can provide a written record of each visit, what was applied and where, which is what most food businesses need to show. For a single restaurant or a small group that is straightforward and we set it up as a matter of course. If you are running a large multi site operation with a formal audit programme, Securekil, the parent company, is set up for that scale and we will pass you across rather than pretend otherwise.