Eden Foods:
Besting the Pests

By Sarah Fister Gale


When Eden Foods first took over the old Schmidt Noodle plant in Detroit, MI in 1982, you couldn’t walk 20 feet without stepping on a cockroach. The building, built in 1926 with two add-ons in the 1940s and 1950s, was vast, dirty and decaying. There were holes in the floors and walls, abandoned machinery in every room and layers of filth that had accumulated through decades of ineffective cleaning. To battle the constant onslaught of bugs and rodents, the previous owners performed regular pesticide fogs, with minimal effectiveness.

Steve Swaney, general manager of the Eden Organic Pasta Co., a certified 100% organic pasta facility that maintains the traditional methods, set out to change all of that. He was determined to fix it up, clean it up, and run this 70-year-old, inner-city facility using only organic pest management techniques. “A lot of people said it couldn’t be done,” he says, “but I didn’t agree.”

For a company that began in 1968 as a natural food co-op dedicated to offering the citizens of Ann Arbor, MI, pure whole foods grown without the use of pesticides or chemicals, this situation was anathema to Eden’s corporate philosophy. In addition to the Detroit pasta manufacturing plant, Eden Foods operates plants producing organic canned beans, soy noodles, soy milk, tomatoes, sauerkraut, quinoa, fruit and juices, condiments and sweeteners, and more (www.edenfoods.com). Eden pioneered the first standards in the Americas for “seed to table” organic food handling and processing. Today, all of the company’s plants, mills, warehouses and trucks are inspected and certified for the handling of organic food.

In 1989, the Eden Organic Pasta Co. became America’s first certified organic food processing facility. To achieve that designation, Swaney had to figure a way to best the pests using organic pest management strategies. With L. Ernest Otter, a pest control management specialist from Detroit-based PestCo, Swaney created a plan to first eliminate the bugs and rodents and then to keep them at bay. It began with intense cleaning of the entire facility. “That’s the biggest part of pest management,” Otter says. “Take away their food, water and whatever else they are after and they’ll leave.”

Swaney’s team began by cleaning the facility top to bottom, including scrubbing all the machinery, floors, walls and ceilings. They got rid of unused equipment, put a fresh coat of paint on the walls, and repaired holes using a simple but effective technique to exterminate mice without chemicals. “We called it the steel wool factor,” Swaney says of the repairs. They stuffed balls of steel wool into mouse holes then covered them with plaster. “When the mice chewed the wool it cut their mouths and they bled to death.” They also filled holes in the dock area with a combination of broken glass, nails and cement to deter rats, who would cut themselves on the treacherous material. “We haven’t seen a single rat since then.”

The floors presented another challenge. The entire 13,625-square-foot facility was covered with tongue-in-groove wood floors that were cracked and littered with dirt and flour dust. They hadn’t been built to withstand the weight of heavy jacks, equipment and pallets loaded with 100-lb. bags of flour, causing the whole floor to wear and buckle, Swaney says. To make matters worse, between the floors and the concrete foundation was a half-inch gap of air that created a perfect conduit for roaches and beetles.

To eliminate this insect corridor, Otter and Swaney drilled holes in the floor, a foot apart along the entire interior perimeter of the facility, and filled the space with Diatomaceous earth, a non-toxic dust that has the consistency of ground coral or glass. When the insects crawl through the dust it cuts their waxy coats causing them to dehydrate and die. Once the space beneath the floor was filled, Swaney and Otter covered the holes, sealed the floors and reinforced high traffic areas with steel plates to prevent further cracking. Swaney continues to have the floors sanded and resealed regularly to reduce the opportunity for flour to collect.

It’s Everyone’s Job
Repairing and cleaning the facility the first time was just the beginning, Swaney says. Cleaning had to become a constant and integral part of how the plant operated in order to keep the rodents and pests out. That meant hiring a full-time cleaner and changing employees’ work station practices.

When Swaney first came to the plant, he says, people might clean up their area the day following their shift and there was no one dedicated to cleaning and monitoring the entire facility. That meant infestations could easily go unchecked for days—and quickly grow out of control—before someone became aware of that there was a problem. “It doesn’t take much for a pile of flour to start hatching,” he says. “Then you’ve got problems.”

Swaney changed all that. Today at Eden, cleaning is everyone’s job. “It’s what we do when we aren’t doing something else, and we do it every day,” he says. Employees clean their work stations at the end of every shift, and they never, ever leave spills unattended. Cleaning is so important that Swaney asks every job applicant how they feel about cleaning before he’ll consider hiring them.

He also hired a full-time dedicated cleaner and pest monitor who scours the main areas of the facility from floor to ceiling three days a week, and the other areas twice a week. He says this is where other facilities that are considering organic pest measures have a hard time embracing his approach. “They don’t want to employ a full-time cleaner or they are tempted to use that person for other tasks,” he says. “But we see how important that role is. Without him we’d all be out of a job.”

The cleaning person keeps tabs on any possible infestation with glue trap pest monitors that are strategically placed throughout the facility. He checks them daily and if he sees activity in one of the traps the area is immediately scoured and the source of the infestation is tracked. “If you don’t monitor daily, infestations can take over,” Swaney says, noting that a flour beetle’s life cycle is 21 days. “If a population is allowed to mature new lifecycles start every day making it almost impossible to wipe them out,” he says. “You have to break the cycle to get rid of the problem.”

A Light Bulb Went On
Even with all of these efforts, which took several years to fully implement, the Eden plant still battled flour beetle infestations on a regular basis, until Swaney made an unusual discovery. While working under a pasta dryer one day he noticed that his trouble-light was driving a group of flour beetles crazy. He held the light directly over one of them and watched it spin in circles then tip over and die.

“I just stumbled onto the idea,” he says, but it had brilliant repercussions. The plant has several huge drying ovens with intense heat capacity. He realized the heat could be used to battle the bugs if they were left on long enough. So, every few weeks they throw open the dryers and heat the rooms to 130F for four hours, using fans to blow the hot air to all corners of the facility.

“We call them bug bake outs,” says Otter, noting that those temperatures will destroy all stages of the flour beetle lifecycle in a matter of minutes. “The answer was staring us in the face. We just had to recognize it.”

To further prevent pests from entering the plant, Eden also goes to great lengths to test and retest raw ingredients, pallets and delivery trucks to ensure no pests are brought in from the outside. “If one infested pallet gets in you’ve got a bag full of trouble,” Swaney says.

He’s also worked to create a pest-free zone around the facility by investing time, money and effort into controlling the land around the building. The staff keeps the grass and weeds at the base of the plant cropped short. They gutted and cleaned the field across the street, which had grown wild and was used as a dump for garbage and tires. Today, Eden Foods manages the area, keeping it free of debris that could harbor insects or rodents.

Rosanne Swaney, Steve’s wife and the number-two person at the plant, also successfully lobbied the city to tear down six burnt-out buildings in the community—to eliminate rodent harbors and to make it a safer place to live. As a result, the area around the plant is clean, free of abandoned homes, and Eden sponsors the neighborhood watch program for the community. “It’s a nicer place for the kids to live and when other people saw how we were cleaning up they got involved,” Swaney says proudly. “It’s infectious.”

Long Road to Success
It wasn’t quick or easy to turn this run-down plant into an organic showplace but the transformation is complete and impressive. When Swaney started 15 years ago, the facility was about to be red-tagged for code violations. It was filthy and people were scared to go into the basement, he says. Today, they have U.S. Department of Agriculture National Organic Standard certification and all of the company’s American facilities have been third-party inspected and rated by the American Institute of Baking (AIB) as “Superior” and “Excellent,” reflecting Eden Foods’ commitment to food safety, sanitation and Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) management programs. In addition, the Michigan Department of Agriculture regularly brings trainees through the plant to show them an example of how a food manufacturer can create a successful integrated pest management system, even under the most challenging circumstances.

To be sure they continue to meet organic standards for cleanliness, the plant has regular inspections from state, federal, AIB, OCIA, and internal inspectors to guarantee its cleanliness. “People usually hate inspectors,” Swaney adds. “But if you work with them, they’ll show you your weak spots and help you fix them. They see things that you may not be able to see.”

Eden Foods uses no pesticides or weed killers anywhere, and its partnership with Otter has engendered organic pest management strategies for Eden that work better than chemicals, creating the category of “structural pest management” in the realm of organic certification procedures in North America and Europe. In fact, the company has its own 100%-biodegradable cleaning products that contain no phosphates or petrochemicals.

And they are doing it for a lot less money than conventional food manufacturing facilities spend. “Once you have control over the problem, integrated pest management is cheaper than using pesticides,” says Swaney, who estimates that the salary for his dedicated cleaner costs Eden half of what the chemical spray programs at other facilities cost.

Sarah Fister Gale is Contributing Editor to Organic Processing Magazine. She can be reached at sfister@mn.rr.com.