Eliminating a chronic roach problem at a Nashville restaurant

At a glance

• Industry: Full-service restaurant, ~180 seats
• Location: Downtown Nashville, TN
• Issue: Chronic German cockroach infestation, 2 failed health inspections
• Program: Targeted IPM with weekly monitoring
• Outcome: 95%+ reduction in 30 days, zero findings at re-inspection

The problem

When the client reached out, they had already cycled through two national pest control vendors over roughly 14 months with no lasting results. German cockroach sightings were happening during dinner service — on the cook line, in the dish pit, and occasionally in the dining room — and the facility had failed two consecutive Metro Health Department inspections. One more failure would have triggered a temporary closure.

The prior programs relied almost entirely on monthly perimeter sprays. That approach doesn't address German cockroaches, which live and breed inside equipment, wall voids, and warm motor housings — not along baseboards.

Our approach

We started with a two-hour inspection of the entire back-of-house, including a flashlight-and-mirror sweep behind the cook line, under the dish machine, inside the walk-in cooler motor housing, and through every piece of dry storage. We mapped harborage points and staged monitoring traps before we treated anything.

• Full-facility inspection with harborage mapping
• Targeted gel bait rotation at every identified harborage point
• Insect growth regulator (IGR) application to break the reproductive cycle
• Sticky monitors in the kitchen, dish pit, and dry storage — counted weekly
• Sealed cracks, gaps, and pass-throughs behind cook line equipment
• Nightly sanitation checklist built with the kitchen manager to protect bait placements

Week-by-week

Week 1: Baseline trap counts averaged 47 cockroaches per trap across the kitchen. Bait and IGR placed. Week 2: Counts dropped to 12 per trap. Week 4: Counts averaged 2 per trap, with several zeros in dry storage. Week 6: Zero live catches across all monitoring points for seven consecutive days.

The result

The restaurant passed its next scheduled health inspection with zero pest-related findings. The facility remains on a monthly maintenance program with quarterly deep inspections. In the 8 months since the initial clearance, monitoring traps have caught a total of three cockroaches — all near a new delivery door that has since been sealed.

"Eradicare figured out in one visit what two other companies missed in a year. Our staff finally feels good about opening the doors."

Why it worked

German cockroach programs fail when they're built around visible activity instead of biology. By targeting harborage, breaking the reproductive cycle with an IGR, and measuring results with real trap data every week, we knew exactly when the population was collapsing — not just whether the kitchen looked cleaner. That's the standard we hold every commercial account to.