Fruit Flies in Commercial Establishment in Roselle, NJ

Challenge

Have you ever walked into a restaurant and noticed small flies hanging out on the dining room walls?  Well, these are fruit flies, and walking into a restaurant with bugs diminishes the dining experience, to put it mildly. Pests for any business is a problem, but for restaurants and other businesses in the food industry, insects can have devastating consequences. 

Fruit flies are common indoor pests associated with fermenting fruits and vegetables. You can find them anywhere from small kitchen apartments to large grocery stores or restaurants. Adult fruit flies are tiny, at most 4 mm (about 1/8” long), so their features are hard to see. However, if inspected closely, they are dull yellow-brown to dark brown with wings that have two "breaks" in the leading edge (vein) nearest the body. Perhaps their most distinctive feature is their bright red eyes. A fruit fly has a short life, only about 30 days, but it stays busy. During that time, a single fly leaves behind about 500 eggs. The entire lifecycle from egg to adult is about a week.

Fruit flies are attracted to spoiled food smells. Food starts to smell as bacteria and fungi that are decomposing the food release certain chemicals. If you have ripening, fermenting, or rotting tomatoes, bananas, or anything else perishable in your kitchen, you may soon find yourself with a fruit fly infestation. Besides over-ripe fruits and other foods, fruit flies are attracted to fermenting liquids in the bottom of a garbage can, or even just a rotting potato or onion in the vegetable bin. Recycling bins and their contents and fruit and salad bars are ideal fruit fly habitats. Fruit flies breed anywhere there is a moist film of organic material. You can find them in drains, garbage disposals, mops and cleaning rags, and even grease traps. 

One of my commercial accounts in Roselle was experiencing a great deal of fruit fly activity. To control fruit flies and prevent a re-infestation you have to find and eliminate the organic breeding material. If there are adult fruit flies on your premises, you are guaranteed that there are fruit fly larvae developing in some nearby fermenting materials. 

Solution

Complete and thorough sanitation is necessary to eliminate the infestation source, the decaying organic matter where the larvae eat and develop. To break down this organic material so it can’t be used by the larvae, I use Bio-foam, a bioenzymatic cleaner. With this commercial customer, I treated the drains and garbage cans with Bio-Foam. 

However, removing the breeding habitat is not enough. Fruit flies will return if the underlying issues that attracted them in the first place are not resolved. With these infestations, it is necessary to conduct a thorough inspection to determine all of the fruit fly attractants so that they can be corrected. This customer had a number of attractants: mops left overnight in dirty water, garbage cans with liquid residue, and built-up food residue on the garbage collector. I discussed these matters and was assured that these sanitation issues would be resolved.