Your Inspection Report

Pest Lines, the Score and the Follow-Up Inspection

Written for: Restaurant owners and managers; multi-unit operators comparing locations

Parts of this page marked Professional synthesis, not law are a Board Certified Entomologist's reading of published records. They are not legal rules, they are not legal advice, and they are written to read the same for an owner, a customer, or either side's counsel.

In Salt Lake County the score is a point total, and lower is better (how to read the report). This page asks two plain questions of the county’s public records: do inspections with a pest line score worse, and do they bring the inspector back sooner? The numbers are county-wide and aggregate; no restaurant is identified (method).

The score

Among routine inspections in the two-year window, those with at least one pest-related line averaged 32.4 points. Those without averaged 18.1.

That gap is not mostly the pest line itself. Most pest lines are non-critical (a door gap is a low-point item), and one line cannot add fourteen points. The gap means that a report with a pest line usually has more of everything else on it too. In my reading, the same conditions produce both: a kitchen with a gap under the back door and cardboard on the floor of the walk-in tends to be a kitchen with other sanitation lines on the same report. The pest line is a symptom of the report, not the cause of it.

The follow-up

The county makes a follow-up inspection when the routine inspection found enough to warrant one, and charges a fee for it (the county regulation). Within 60 days of a routine inspection:

A critical pest line (a pest the inspector saw; a pesticide the inspector found) brought a follow-up roughly one time in five, against one in forty for an inspection with no pest line at all. And at the follow-up itself, three in ten kitchens still carried a pest line (what comes back).

What this means for a manager

Professional synthesis, not law.

1. The critical pest lines are the ones to clear on the spot. A can of store-bought spray leaves with the inspector watching; live cockroaches and flies get a call to your pest company the same day, and the service report goes in the binder. Those two moves address the lines most likely to bring a follow-up and its fee.
2. Treat the pest line as a signal about the whole report. If the report has a pest line, it very likely has a sanitation or repair line next to it that shares a cause. Fix the cause and both lines go.
3. A follow-up is a narrow inspection. The inspector is looking for the items on the last report. Walk the report item by item the day before (self-inspection checklist).

These counts describe the county as a whole. They are not a prediction about any one restaurant, and the inspector, not this site, decides what a follow-up finds.