Partnering to Elevate Your IPM to Meet FSMA

With your new understanding of the FSMA requirements for pest management and how to leverage your partner expertise, you can “ease the burden” and elevate your pest management program through five best practices.

1. Work with your pest management provider to create a comprehensive, preventive pest management plan. This should include a discussion of your facility’s previous pest issues and unique risk factors, enabling your provider to customize your pest management plan to meet all your requirements as well as those of FSMA.

2. Today’s pest management is more than checking traps and reacting to pests. To ensure your facility is taking a preventive approach, your provider should include a thorough inspection on every visit, investigating and documenting not only what pests exist, but also why. This will likely require not only additional time on each service call, but also additional expertise, with your provider needing experience in food and beverage production facilities and expertise in pest biology to get to the root of pest issues.

3. Prevention also means requiring that your pest management provider inspect for conducive conditions and other potential pest risks in your facility. And once found, the provider should clearly document corrective action and provide expert technical service for its execution — enabling your staff’s time and resources to focus on taking action rather than on deciding what needs to be done.

4. Inherent in your provider’s documentation should be extensive information on the issues and risks they’ve identified, recommended corrective actions, and corrective actions taken. Best practice is such documentation through an easily accessible digital platform that enables threshold reporting and alerting and analysis of pest data for trends to help drive proactive pest management and prevention.

5. When selecting a pest management provider, ask if they provide training resources for your staff. This could include self-guided training materials, on-site employee training, or train the trainer resources for your in-house training program. The resources should include not only the “what” of pest identification, food safety risks, and their role in mitigation, but also “why” their understanding and actions are critical in ensuring against pest contamination and product safety.