Over the last year, TAG has provided insights into current warning letters and made recommendations to industry to help avoid similar situations. To correspond with this week’s article on pests, we have compiled some of the relevant citations from warning letters related to these issues.
Warning letters that included the pest citations were issued to:
- Noodle manufacturer due to pests not excluded from the facility, including observations of flying birds, live flying and worm-like insects, cockroaches, and a dead mouse.
- Shell egg farm and processing facility for observation of gaps that could permit the entry of pests. Additionally, gaps in the pest control program included the lack of monitoring for fly presence and rodent bait consumption, and the presence of debris and vegetation around the poultry houses that could permit pest harborage.
- Refrigerated, frozen and ambient warehouse had numerous pest violations, including observations of rodent excreta pellets in numbers too numerous to count in various places around warehouse, on boxes and pallets of product, on burlap sacks containing ingredients. Also observed were live maggots; gnaw marks, rodent hairs, and rodent excreta pellets in tested food samples; and situations that could lead to pest infestation including gaps around doors, open doors, and overgrown vegetation near the building perimeter.
- Bakery where evidence of pest activity was observed include a live mouse, rodent excreta pellets in multiple areas in the warehouse, fruit flies were in an ingredient storage area, and live flour beetles in an ingredient staging area.
- Juice producer where flying insects were observed in a production area, for which the inspector noted that the presence of pests in the food plant must be monitored with sufficient frequency to ensure that pests are not allowed in any area.
