Passing Your Next SQF or BRC Audit: The Pest Control Checklist

Pest management is one of the most heavily weighted prerequisite program areas in an SQF or BRCGS food safety audit, and most facilities that lose points here don't have an active infestation — they have a documentation gap. Auditors are trained to look past whether pests are present on the day of the visit and ask whether the program proves control over time. This guide covers exactly what an SQF or BRC auditor checks in the pest control section, the seven records you need on hand before they arrive, and where NYC facilities specifically tend to lose points between review cycles.

What SQF and BRC Actually Require for Pest Control

Both frameworks treat pest control as a prerequisite program — the baseline conditions a facility maintains before any product-specific food safety plan even comes into play. The SQF Food Safety Code requires a written pest control program covering monitoring, corrective action, and verification, whether that program is run in-house or through a licensed contractor. BRCGS's Global Standard for Food Safety takes a similar approach under its prerequisite programs section, expecting a documented program with facility-specific detail, not a generic service agreement.

What both standards share is the expectation that pest control is treated as an ongoing, verifiable system: mapped, monitored, logged, and analyzed — not a service that happens to occur on a schedule somewhere in a filing cabinet.

The 7 Records an Auditor Will Ask to See

1. Written pest management program or service agreement — a formal document, not a verbal arrangement, naming the licensed provider and the scope of work.
2. Facility station map — every interior monitoring device and exterior bait station numbered and plotted on a current floor plan, cross-referenced to the service logs.
3. Risk-based monitoring frequency — a documented reason your production floor is checked more often than dry storage, not just a single blanket schedule.
4. Service logs — technician name and license number, date, findings at each station, and any product applied with its EPA registration number.
5. Trend analysis — activity plotted over time by station and by pest type, showing whether the program is actually reducing pressure. This is the single most commonly missing item in facilities that otherwise have clean service logs.
6. Corrective action records — what happened when activity was found: the response, the follow-up, and confirmation the issue was resolved.
7. Current SDS binder — safety data sheets for every product used on site, kept up to date as products rotate.

Where NYC Facilities Specifically Lose Points

NYC's food processing and distribution facilities carry a pest pressure profile that most national audit checklists don't fully account for. Dense urban rodent populations, aging infrastructure, and proximity to restaurant and waste corridors mean the gap between service visits matters more here than in a suburban or rural facility. A few specific failure points show up repeatedly:

Station Maps That Don't Match Reality

Stations get added, removed, or relocated as a facility's layout changes, and the documentation doesn't always keep pace. An auditor who finds a station that isn't on the map — or a mapped station that no longer exists — treats it as a program integrity issue, not a minor paperwork slip.

DOH-Compliant Doesn't Mean Audit-Ready

A facility can be fully current on its NYC DOH inspection requirements and still fail the pest control section of an SQF or BRC audit. DOH inspections check for current pest activity and a general pest control arrangement at a point in time. SQF and BRC expect the facility-specific map, the monitoring history, and the trend analysis on top of that. Passing one doesn't mean you're ready for the other.

Reinfestation Pressure Between Cycles

Facilities near high food-traffic corridors face near-continuous reinfestation pressure. A program built around quarterly visits leaves real gaps in a dense urban environment — the monitoring frequency has to be justified by the actual risk profile of the location, and an auditor will ask why the schedule was set the way it was.

Building an Audit-Ready Program Before Your Next Review

An audit-ready IPM program for a NYC food facility is built around the same seven records an auditor will ask for, generated as a byproduct of the service itself rather than assembled the week before a review:

• Facility risk mapping — zones classified by FDA/FSMA and SQF/BRC standards, with monitoring frequency set and documented by zone.
• Digital station mapping — every station numbered, plotted, and kept current as your facility layout changes.
• Automatic trend reporting — activity data compiled into trend analysis after every service cycle, not reconstructed manually before an audit.
• Corrective action documentation — issued in an FDA-compliant format the moment activity is found, with follow-up scheduled and logged.
• Current SDS binder maintenance — updated automatically as products rotate.
• Audit-day support — a Broadway Pest technician or account manager available to walk your auditor through the documentation directly.

Frequently Asked Questions

Broadway Pest Services builds FSMA-aligned, SQF- and BRC-ready pest management programs for NYC food processing and distribution facilities — station mapping, trend analysis, and corrective action documentation included from the first service visit, not assembled the week before your auditor arrives.