Giridhar Pai – India’s pioneer of stored product insect pest monitoring in the food industry: Our Managing Partner, Giridhar Pai, is the pioneer of stored product insect pest (SIP) monitoring in India, having begun it in the Indian food industry and introducing it to the Indian pest control industry.
At the start of his career in 1995 as a food safety manager at AVT McCormick Ingredients Limited (AVT McCormick), a leading spice exporter, he initiated India’s first and to-date largest pheromone trap monitoring programme for tracking SIP populations at the company’s warehouses.
He quickly became an expert in using pheromone traps for monitoring cigarette beetles, flour beetles and warehouse moths. He used Indian and foreign-made pheromone traps and lures.
He successfully established the monitoring programmes at AVT McCormick as an early warning system for SIP presence, reducing insect incidence, pest treatment costs and product losses.
After Giridhar Pai joined Pest Control India Private Limited (PCI) in 2000, he launched the Trece Storgard insect monitoring systems of the United States of America in India. He introduced stored product insect monitoring for food processors.
Over the past three decades, the Indian food and pest control industries have benefitted from the availability of various pheromone trapping systems in India for monitoring and detecting common SIP species. SIP pheromone monitoring is simple, inexpensive, and easy to detect insect presence in food products, storage and processing.
By 2020, Giridhar Pai found that customers could not easily purchase SIP pheromone traps in India.
Though customers were seeking the Storgard Insect Monitoring system range, there was no Indian distributor for the products.
Direct import of the products by customers was impractical due to low purchase volumes, the need to bear shipping costs, and customs duties for any purchase quantity.
Sensing the opportunity for reputed SIP pheromone traps in India, Giridhar Pai re-established contact with Trece, Inc. of USA and re-initiated the import of the Storgard insect monitoring system range to India starting in 2024.
As a result of Giridhar Pai’s pioneering industry leadership, the Indian food processing and pest control industries can again access the world’s best Storgard insect monitoring system to detect and estimate stored-product insect pest populations in the Indian food industry supply chains.
United States of America’s Trece Inc’s Storgard Insect Monitoring Systems: The leading global supplier of pheromone traps and lures, Trece, Inc of USA created the Storgard Insect Monitoring Systems for SIPs in the nineties of the twentieth century.
STORGARD pheromone traps are an early-warning system for detecting potentially damaging SIPs during food processing, storage, transport and retailing of foods and other products vulnerable to SIP infestation.
Using Storgard pheromone traps for SIP monitoring makes it possible to reduce losses and ensure the safety and quality of stored foods, leading to time and money savings.
STORGARD has been among the global pest management industry’s leading SIP monitoring systems for over three decades, offering various traps, pheromone lures, food attractants and grain probes.
As STORGARD products are species-specific and sensitive even to low SIP populations, they are useful in achieving zero insect populations in wheat and rice milling, baking, snack food, pet food and numerous other food processing and storage facilities.
STORGARD insect monitoring systems provide an edge in the battle against SIP moths and beetles, which are present through the supply chain of human, animal, and pet foods.
Storgard products are ideal for early SIP detection and monitoring in varied environments such as raw material storage, transportation, processing, finished goods storage, distribution, and retailing.
Due to their highly evolved nature, SIPs persist in the global food supply chains. Monitoring them through highly effective products like Storgard pheromone traps is essential for food safety.
Storgard product availability in India from 2024: Due to its managing partner’s familiarity with the products, GPAL has carefully evaluated the Storgard range and imported in January 2024 the products that Indian customers were familiar with during 2000-2020, after which the product range became unavailable in India.
Indian food industry customers are most familiar with the Storgard Dome Trap kits, which are very useful for monitoring:
∙Cigarette Beetles (CB) (Lasioderma serricorne)
∙Confused (CFB) (Tribolium confusum)
∙Red Flour Beetles (Tribolium castaneum)
∙Tobacco moth (TM) (Ephestia elutella)
Starting January 2024, GPAL will initially supply Dome Trap Kits and pheromone lures for CB, CFB, and RFB in India, and only the pheromone lures for the TM.
We are confident that the pheromone traps and lures for CB, CFB, RFB, and TM shall meet the basic SIP monitoring requirements of the Indian food processing industry.
GPAL plans for Storgard stored product insect monitoring:
GPAL aims to keep adding innovative pest management solutions such as SIP pheromone traps and lures, which are non-toxic pest management options.
Through its pan-India distributor network, GPAL is making the Trece Storgard insect monitoring system range available across India to the food industry, pet food industry and pest control industry.
The food and pest control industries will greatly benefit by monitoring SIP populations in processing, storage, and transport and have an assured source for purchasing Storgard in India through Giridhar Pai Associates LLP.
As SIP adults and larvae, the active life stages, are tiny and not easily visible, Storgard pheromone traps are the ideal solution for continuous monitoring of SIP presence and populations.
Giridhar Pai Associates LLP’s plans for the Storgard range include offering the pheromone traps and lures against other SIPs listed below.
∙Khapra beetle (Trogoderma granarium)
∙Warehouse beetle (Trogoderma variabile)
∙Almond Moth (Cadra cautella)
∙Sawtoothed Grain Beetle (Orzyphaeilus surinamensis)
∙Merchant Grain Beetle (Oryzaephilus mercator)
∙Lesser Grain Borer (Rhyzopertha dominica)
Summary: GPAL continues pioneering efforts by re-launching India’s Trece Storgard insect monitoring systems range in 2024. The Indian food and pest control industries greatly benefit from the availability of pheromone traps against a range of common stored-product insect pests commonly found through the supply chain. The current practice of routine fumigation and other SIP treatments without correlation to the SIP population can be improved by SIP monitoring with Storgard insect monitoring systems. SIP monitoring is a sustainable practice that will lead to reduced pesticide use and safer food through focused interventions for pest control in infested products and environments. GPAL is proud to continue contributing to food safety in India by offering the Storgard insect
monitoring systems.