By Dr. Alice Sinia
As rodent activity trends upward across Canada, restaurants must beef up their prevention plans. Stopping rodent issues before they start is the best way to protect your business’ reputation, safeguard food safety and maintain customer trust. Research shows that Toronto, Victoria, and Vancouver saw the most rodents between August 2024 and July 2025 out of all Canadian cities. The nonscientific data shows rat and mouse pressures are up in both residential and commercial spaces.
In restaurants, rats and mice pose serious food safety concerns because they can physically contaminate food and prep surfaces with their droppings, urine, and hairs. What’s more, they are known carriers of several significant diseases and parasites. Beyond the health risks, rodents may also damage infrastructure. That’s why proactive prevention – not just reactive extermination – is critical in the foodservice sector all year long.
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Protecting restaurants from rodents requires Integrated Rodent Management, a rodent-specific strategy based on the principles of Integrated Pest Management (IPM). Operators need comprehensive, value-driven IPM programs tailored to a restaurant’s layout, workflow, and specific rodent pressures, both inside and outside. IPM programs blend inspection, sanitation, exclusion, habitat modification, and monitoring with minimal disruption to daily operations. A robust, science-based IMP approach often includes but is not limited to:
Exclusion: Keep rodents out. Mice can squeeze through gaps as small as a dime and rats through a quarter-sized opening, so it’s imperative to seal all potential entry points. Install weather-stripping on doors and seal cracks or gaps around pipes, in walls and floors, and around foundations to minimize easy access into the building. Ensure exterior exit doors to garbage rooms or outside compactors are always kept closed.
Good sanitation practices: Eliminate things that attract rodents. Rats and mice are drawn by readily available food, water and shelter, so reducing these things is key to prevention. Remove food and water sources by promptly cleaning spills and food residues, storing ingredients and food waste in sealed containers, fixing leaky pipes or faucets, and eliminating other standing water sources. Regular cleaning of kitchen surfaces, storage areas and trash zones makes your operation less appealing to rodents. Practice good garbage management, too. Ensure compactor areas or garbage rooms are clean, with no garbage on the floor or ground. Your compactor or garbage bins should never be overflowing, so make sure they are emptied on regular basis.
Habitat modifications: Make the restaurant environment unsuitable for rodents. Modify both the interior and exterior of the restaurant to reduce areas where rodents can live, nest, and reproduce. Remove clutter, store items off the floor, and keep storage areas well organized on shelves with adequate aisles space for housekeeping and monitoring. Repair structural deficiencies that can provide shelter such as voids, holes and damage in walls, the ceiling, and floors. Even in the colder weather, ensure the exterior remains free of clutter and vegetation debris, as these materials offer harbourage and encourage rodent activity.
Inspect rigorously: Early detection is key. Monitoring for signs of rodent activity, such as droppings, gnaw marks, burrows, and sightings, can help nip potential infestations in the bud. Ensure staff are educated on the basics of rodent prevention, including signs of rodent activity and your restaurant protocols for reporting any activity.
With urban rodent pressure rising in many cities, the operators who anticipate problems and build prevention into their standard operating procedures are the ones who will protect both health standards and brand reputation.
Whether you’re updating your existing plan or starting from scratch, now is the best time to reach out to a pest management professional about creating the right Integrated Rodent Management approach tailored to your needs.
With more than 20 years of experience in entomology, Dr. Alice Sinia is responsible for the management of the Orkin Canada Quality Assurance Laboratory. She performs analytical entomology, investigating product adulteration using biochemical and comparative tissue methods, and provides technical support in pest/insect identification to branch offices and clients nationwide. In addition, Dr. Sinia monitors changes to government regulations pertaining to the pest control industry and provides guidance to the company.
