If you manage a food processing facility, the last thing you want is pests crawling all over your products when you ship them off. It’s unsanitary, and if the product is covered in bugs by the time it gets to the retailer, then you could be in a lot of trouble. This is why food processing facilities need commodity fumigation. Commodity fumigation is a safe and effective way to maintain the integrity of whatever food product you are processing and shipping off.
Commodity fumigation is when a large batch of product is covered up and sealed off into some sort of a container, such as a railcar or room, covered up and then fumigated to eliminate any pests that could infest the product. For a food processing plant, this could be bags of rice or grain, corn, nuts, fruits, plants, vegetables and more.
The component that a lot of these foods have in common is that they all have the potential to attract pests. Ants love perishables like corn and vegetables, and fruit flies obviously have a hankering for fruit that never ends up satisfied. Commodity fumigation is the best way to eliminate any of these pests before shipment. If you ship this food off without conducting the fumigation process, you then give pests like ants a chance to grow and make their way into the processed food that you are shipping. You might not even have known that there were ants in the first place, but like most pests, ants can go undetected for quite some time before they grow and colonize into a serious problem.
When you’re picking a pest control company, it’s important to make sure that they meet the proper standards for conducting commodity fumigation. For a food processing facility, you’ll need to make sure that they are set up to fumigate the type of food you’re processing in the place where you want to fumigate it. This can usually be figured out either by looking at the company’s website or giving them a phone call. You’ll also need to make sure that the pest control company you hire is USDA approved for quarantine of processed foods.
Ignoring commodity fumigation could be detrimental to your food processing facility. With such large quantities of product being processed and shipped off, the possibility of an infestation increases, and the chance of it becoming a catastrophic problem for your business skyrockets.
