Food industry practices affecting pest management

Purpose of review: This review highlights the most common practices in the dry food industry that may affect pest management programs. It also focuses on critical practices that may interfere with good integrated pest management (IPM) practices in food industry facilities and buildings. Findings: Manufacturers of dry food products have a real challenge to exclude pests everywhere along the food chain because of the very complex and different environments of food industry buildings. Current practices that influence pest presence and development in food industry facilities have been identified in the stages of food plant construction, food ingredient reception and storage, processing or conditioning of finished food, and marketing. The preventive pest control measures in the food industry may be ineffective because of a non-observance of simple rules of good manufacturing practice (GMP), such as permanent control and monitoring of critical points or unsafe practices favourable to pest entry and infestation in food plants. The underutilization of methods for rapid assessment of pest presence and movement within food industry facilities, as well as the inability to rely on pest monitoring data for the economic damage threshold (EDT), are also underlined. Directions for future research: Practical tools for processing data from pest monitoring systems should improve pest presence detection and alert. More realistic EDTs need to be proposed with direct links to decision-making support. More practical predictive models are also required for predicting the long-term efficacy and resilience of corrective control methods in food processing buildings, which should render the implementation of complex IPM programs easier.