Your Inspection Report

What Comes Back: Repeat Pest Findings at the Next Inspection

Written for: Restaurant owners and managers, multi-unit operators, kitchen managers

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.

A pest line on one report is a fact about one day. Whether it is there again at the next visit is the thing a manager can change. This page measures how often it is, across the county, in aggregate. No restaurant is identified; the method is on the methodology page.

The next routine inspection

Take every routine inspection in the county that carried a pest-related line and had another routine inspection within the next 12 months. There were 510 of them in the period measured. At 174 of those next inspections, 34.1 percent, there was a pest-related line again.

For comparison, the chance that any routine inspection is followed within 12 months by one with a pest-related line is 14.6 percent. A kitchen that had a pest line is a little more than twice as likely as the county at large to have one at its next visit.

That is less alarming than it sounds, and more useful. Two in three kitchens cleared it. The one in three that did not is, in my reading, mostly the same unfixed door or the same unsealed pipe chase, because most pest lines are about openings, and an opening does not close itself between inspections (what inspectors cite).

The follow-up inspection

The county also makes follow-up inspections, usually within weeks of a routine inspection that found enough to warrant one. Of the 107 pest-related routine inspections that got a follow-up within 60 days, 32, or 29.9 percent, still carried a pest-related line at the follow-up.

A follow-up is the visit where the inspector is looking for exactly the things written on the last report. Seven in ten kitchens had answered them. Three in ten had not, or had answered one and been cited for another.

What this means for a manager

Professional synthesis, not law.

1. Treat the pest line as a work order, not a verdict. The line says what the inspector saw and where. Fix the cause (the gap, the opening, the harborage, the product under the sink), not the sighting, and write down what you did and when. The Records Binder has a corrective-action log laid out for this.
2. Walk it yourself before the next visit. The self-inspection checklist goes station by station through the places pest lines come from: the back door, dry storage, the dish area, the floor drains, the dumpster. Ten minutes a week catches most of what a follow-up catches.
3. If you have a pest company, hand them the report. A service technician who has read the inspector’s wording can put the station, the bait or the sealant where the line was. If you don’t have one, the questions to ask a pest control company are written for that first call.

These counts describe the county as a whole. They are not a prediction about any one restaurant.