The Craft Beer industry has seen huge growth over the past 5 years with more and more consumers preferring to drink quality crafted beers, ales and stouts over mainstream regulars.

With the increase in popularity, the craft beer industry also saw an increase in production volumes, but does this increase in production volumes lead to a decrease in quality?

The 2019 report from The Society of Independent Brewers (SIBA) suggests that the boom in craft beer has lead to a huge rise in the number of breweries launching onto the market and that "there is increasing concern over the quality of some of the beers being brought to market.".

With many breweries looking to grow their customer footprint and assure quality to existing and new customers many are looking to get SIBA, SALSA + Beer or BRC certified. All of these bodies have a pest control element that your brewery needs to demonstrate which makes up the overall standards required to maintain a clean and safe production environment.

Even if your brewery isn't planning on getting accredited you should take be taking care as a 'food manufacturer' to have a pest control regime in place that ensures your quality remains high and your customers keep coming back!

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Why Pest Control is Essential for Breweries

Controlling heavy pest infestations can be a costly exercise and an infestation could have serious consequences to public health. Here are just a few of the reasons you should take steps to protect your business:

• Reputation - As competition increases, your brand name and customer loyalty are key to further growth. A pest infestation in your brewery could seriously impact your customer drive to buy your products.
• Contamination - Pests are known to spread a range of diseases and pathogens and could be walking over empty cans and bottles before they hit the bottling line.
• Damage - High value equipment, raw materials and your building could be damaged by pests leading to costly repairs.
• Halting Production -  Speed to market is key in a competitive environment. A pest contaminating a production run could cause the halting of your production line and the waste of ingredients!

Pest Control Requirements for Breweries

Microbreweries, Nano Breweries, Craft Breweries & Brew Pubs are all susceptible to a range of pests. Here's our summary of items Breweries should be considering as part of their pest control procedure in order to maintain food hygiene standards and ace those all-important inspections.

Building Proofing

Preventing pest ingress can be particularly difficult. Expert pest controllers understand how rodents behave and are trained to spot areas of buildings that could allow rodents access.

A good example of potential ingress points is around the sides and the base of doors. As a rough guide if you can fit a pencil through the gap then a rodent can get access!

Read more about how proofing can help prevent pest activity in your brewery.

Regular Inspections

Getting regular pest control inspections for your brewery is important, technicians can advise on best practice and spot the signs of activity and damage.

Deploying smart pest control sensors that monitor for pest activity 24/7 can act as an early warning system allowing you to react much faster to any infestation.

Site Maps

Site maps allow you to visualize pest activity and understand where the pest controller has deployed bait points.

Your site map should automatically update when pest activity in your brewery is detected, so you are instantly aware and can pinpoint the precise location of the issue.

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Pest Activity Logs

Every time a technician is on-site your pest control should produce a site audit report that details what activity was found and ensure that photos of problem areas are captured.

Regularly review these reports to ensure you know what pests might be active. A good technician will always guide you through the report and walk the site with you to show you any pest activity.

Recommendations

A recommendation is simply a snippet of information from your technician about a problem or area that needs attention.

Keeping on top of recommendations made by technicians are the key to maintaining good hygiene and will help you maintain good pest control.

Recommendations made by your technician should cover hygiene, building proofing, points of entry, inaccessible areas and more.

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Trending and Reporting

Your pest control company should have an online reporting system, this acts as a single point to get access to all of your documentation and reporting.

Check your supplier's pest control portal has the following features:

• See and download all site audit reports. A report of each visit should be available and easily downloadable so they can be given to your auditors.
• Manage recommendations and assign them as in progress. The ability to change and modify the status on recommendations allows your teams and auditors to know what's being worked on.
• See and manage your smart devices. (Alerts of activity, Interactive site maps and historical trending reports should all be available).
• Risk Scores. Understand the overall risk score of your site and which areas inside of your brewery are most at risk.
• See what baits and insecticides have been used on each visit. You should also have access to MSDS sheets should they be needed.

Read more about the features and benefits of the Pest Pulse portal.

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