Ecolab launches ‘Rodent Ceiling Service,’ wins award

LOGO: ECOLAB

St. Paul, Minn.-based Ecolab Inc. has launched the Ecolab Pest Elimination Rodent Ceiling Service, which was recently recognized with a 2020 Kitchen Innovation Award from the National Restaurant Association.

“Our data shows that 40 percent of restaurants with rodent activity will likely have rodents in the ceiling,” Julie Marquardt, VP of Research, Development & Engineering for Ecolab Pest Elimination, said in a news release. “This has often been difficult to detect and control, but our new approach to ceiling monitoring helps enable us to quickly identify and resolve rodent activity and protect public health.”

An illustration of how the service works can be found in a sales sheet, available on the service web page.

The centerpiece of the service is the use of patent-pending rodent traps that discreetly blend in with other lighting in the ceiling tiles. Ecolab reports a three-times faster reduction of interior rodent activity within a facility with the use of the ceiling service. A case study that is downloadable from its website describes a restaurant chain with 200 locations, the majority of which are in shopping malls and adjacent structures. When a rodent fell from the ceiling onto a guest, the Rodent Ceiling Service was put into action at select locations for a six-month trial. The trial was such a success that the chain implemented the service at all of its locations. A year in, the case study reports a 60 percent reduction in rodent ceiling activity for the chain: “As a result, over 97 percent of locations have seen no activity.”

Ecolab also won a 2019 Kitchen Innovation Award for its relaunch of its Advanced Health Department Intelligence (HDI) program. According to the writeup, HDI “capitalizes on next-generation technologies and a raft of new analytics for a whole new, greatly magnified view of health department activities across the country. It’s expanded the database to over 1.5 million locations from 65,000+. Real-time alerts on numerous categories, data retrieval, and customer-facing dashboards all are cutting edge.”