Sounds blunt but sort the issue. Sorry. But this is not your problem to try and mitigate and if you mitigate it will tie you up in knots and be more likely to delay fixing it for good. Unless you are a trained pest contractor, you don't have the skills nor are you safe personally to deal with rodent traps etc. It's not just if you're using toxic baits but protection against things like Weils disease (Leptospirosis). Under BRCGS the staff must be "appropriately trained" and your typical food safety courses would not be sufficient for that. They'd be looking for specific training on trap usage, ethics, pest behaviour, health and safet etc. I know of no technical person I've ever worked with (apart from one who was a specific on site pest controller in a VERY large site who didn't subcontract) who would have the right training.
I would convene an incident team because this is an emerging crisis and sometimes it's difficult to see one is when you're in the middle of it. Why? Because these are the current risks:
- Food safety of your product.
- Continued ability to trade if there is found to be a pest infestation from a legal standpoint.
- GFSI certification which will stop you trading with major customers.
- Your health and safety if you try to "plug the gap" which would not be acceptable risk (and likely not to be accepted by GFSI schemes anyway.)
I'd get a meeting together with finance, ops, site director etc. In this meeting, ask for an interim payment to be made to enable the pest visits to continue as they've presumably already stopped and the issue to be resolved completely within x timescale. Then later they need to complete RCA to prevent recurrence anywhere. Will it be your laundry supplier next week? Chemical?
Keep records of all of this with the incident. That way if your BRCGS auditor spots the issue when they visit, you can say "yes, we were aware, this is how we escalated, this is what we did." You might find that even proposing an incident meeting might get things moved along. Even if it's resolved before you meet, still record the whole deal. Helps if you need it for audit and helps push for that RCA. It would also be great practice to risk assess the gap you then have and it's ok if it comes out as a high risk as I think that's true.
If for some reason they don't resolve it despite the above, I'd talk to your Site Director about bringing in another contractor or paying for a visit with your existing contractor via company credit card or similar. It cannot be allowed to persist in my opinion. Again, record, record, record.
As someone who occasionally does the odd external audit nowadays (not BRCGS but in plants working to BRCGS) if I found that a technical team member had done everything they could like the above and it was openly recorded, it would take me from a major non con to a minor (if they had fixed it by the time I arrived) and I'd be raising that minor either in senior management commitment ideally or in pest management but clearly written that it was well managed and escalated by the site Technical team to resolve but the wider leadership team need to understand their accountabilities for food safety and the impact of their actions (probably more subtle than that but you get the idea.) Especially if they'd not done an RCA or the RCA was a load of BS as it often is when you involve other functions in group. There is a good chance of course a future auditor might miss a missing pest visit or two but keep that in your back pocket if they ask something like:
"I see there were no visits in June and July, why was that?"
Let me explain...
That kind of auditee actually FILLS you with confidence on their technical systems. BUT it fills you with fear for their culture. So just be aware that a good auditor will then REALLY probe into the latter but might give you an easier ride on some of the strict systems and documentation side.
