Restaurants & Food Service
Paid for pest control last month. Whether your NYC restaurant passes the next inspection depends on the timing.
One rat sighting is a critical DOHMH rodent violation — 5 points minimum, up to $2,000 in fines, and a B in your window. If that visit falls in week six after your last treatment, the new colony is already rebuilding. The 90-day program closes that window.
What a violation actually costs
One sighting. One inspection. The math gets bad fast.
NYC DOHMH conducts unannounced inspections. Each inspection produces a score that determines your restaurant's letter grade. You do not get to prepare for the visit. You either have the problem under control or you don't.
NJ restaurants face equivalent exposure under state health code. The inspection system differs from NYC's letter grading, but the financial consequences of a rodent citation — remediation costs, reinspection fees, public record, and reputational damage — are comparable.
The real problem
Your exterminator treats what's there. The problem is what moves in after they leave.
Standard treatment removes the colony that's present. The kitchen goes clean. The vendor leaves. Within 4 to 8 weeks, surrounding rats detect the empty territory and a new group moves in. The food source hasn't changed. The entry points haven't changed. The cycle resets before your next scheduled visit.
For a restaurant, this means every inspection is a timing game. If the health inspector arrives in week two after a treatment, you're fine. Week six, you're exposed. There's no version of standard pest control that removes that variable.
Week 1–2
Treatment complete. Active population removed. Clean kitchen.
Week 3–4
Territory sits empty. Surrounding colonies detect vacancy.
Week 5–6
New group moves in. Population rebuilding at full fertility.
Week 7–8
New colony established. Back to the same baseline.
Week 9+
Next treatment visit. Cycle resets. Same problem, same cost.
How it works for restaurants
Two layers. Your existing vendor stays in place.
We don't replace your current pest control setup. We add an integrated pest management layer on top of it, addressing what knockdown alone cannot.
Remove what's there
Your current pest control vendor handles immediate knockdown. We coordinate directly with them to establish a clean baseline before Phase 2 begins. No contract changes, no displacement.
Produces the visible evidence — dead rodents removed, harborage conditions addressed, entry points assessed — that satisfies an inspector and your licensed pest management professional.
Stop the replacement colony
Evolve bait stations are placed in back-of-house, storage areas, and along known travel paths. Evolve is derived from cottonseed and carries EPA minimum risk designation — cleared for use in food-handling environments. Rats that consume it reproduce at a fraction of their normal rate, and over a single breeding cycle the replacement population can't form at full size.
No secondary kill risk to staff, customers, or wildlife. Safe for continuous deployment in active kitchens.
Phase 1 removes the current population while Phase 2 prevents the next colony from forming at full capacity. Over 90 days, documented track counts show the population declining rather than cycling. That documentation goes with you into any inspection.
Field data
Numbers from monitored urban deployments.
Field studies across two independent urban deployment sites. At the city level: NYC began deploying ContraPest in rat mitigation zones in April 2025. Baltimore adopted Evolve for its city rodent control program the same year.
Also serving
Other operators we work with
Start before the next inspection.
The program takes 90 days to produce documented results. The sooner it starts, the more distance you have before the inspector walks in.
- Layered onto your existing pest program
- EPA-designated minimum-risk bait
- Documented monthly reporting
- Month-to-month, no long contracts