Giridhar Pai’s Thirty-Year Journey from 1995 to 2025 of Monitoring Stored Product Insects With Pheromone Traps
When I graduated from Iowa State University with a master’s degree in horticulture in the fall of 1994, I never imagined that my professional path would lead me to a career in pest management.
Life, as they say, has a way of surprising you.
My three-decade journey in the world of stored product insects (SPIs) began in 1995, and it has been a continuous education in innovation, problem-solving, and the deep-seated value of pest prevention.
This blog post is a story of how a young Food Safety Manager evolved into a pioneer of stored product insect pest monitoring in India.
My first role was at AVT McCormick Ingredients Limited (AVT McCormick), where a new spice processing facility was being established, and I joined as a Food Safety Manager in 1995.
My initial responsibilities at McCormick involved everything from helping with construction to managing housekeeping and pest control.
It was at AVT McCormick, in 1995, during a training session at McCormick and Company’s Hunt Valley facility, that my mentor, Wayne Bennett, introduced me to a concept that would define my career: the use of pheromone traps to monitor stored product insects (SPIs).
Stored Product Insect Pheromone Traps were a revelation to me.
While stored product insect pest control through fumigation and other chemical pesticides was a known practice, the concept of proactive, data-driven monitoring using SPI Pheromone Traps was much ahead of its time in India.
We initially began sourcing our lures from Ecomax Agrosystems Pvt. Ltd. (Ecomax), which imported the pheromones from Russell’s IPM of the UK and formulated the lures in India.
However, because Ecomax closed, we started importing pheromone lures from Insects Limited of the USA.
We used reusable bucket traps, designed for monitoring agricultural pests, to capture cigarette beetles (CB) and almond moths (AM), as well as Storgard Dome traps to monitor confused flour beetles and red flour beetles (CFB/RFB).
My five-year tenure at AVT McCormick from 1995 to 2000 culminated in a significant achievement: establishing what was then and even now (in 2025) the largest SPI pheromone monitoring program in any Indian food company.
I’m incredibly proud to say that this comprehensive program is still in operation today, a testament to its effectiveness and the foundational principles AVT McCormick established for monitoring SPIs at its facility.
My stint at AVT McCormick taught me that successful stored product insect pest management isn’t just about their eradication by fumigation, but more about building a robust system of prevention and continuous monitoring using SPI pheromone traps.
In 2000, I joined Pest Control (India) Pvt. Ltd. (PCI) as their quality head.
In the Indian pest control industry, I quickly realised that the standards I had become accustomed to at AVT McCormick were far superior to the prevailing industry practices in India. It was a wake-up call and a call to action to improve the Indian pest control industry.
I set about upgrading PCI’s work practices, determined to bring a new level of professionalism to the Indian pest control industry, making it measure up to the superior standards of pest control in the food industry.
It is at PCI where I pioneered a new service, till then unthought of in the Indian pest control industry.
Recognising a gap in the market for SPI monitoring, in 2002, I spearheaded the introduction of Trece Inc.’s Storgard insect monitoring systems to India, making PCI their official Indian distributor.
I launched PCI’s dedicated stored insect monitoring (SIM) service, which educated the Indian food industry on the value of pheromone traps for detecting common SPIs like CB, CFB/RFB and AM.
After PCI promoted me as the head of its pest control services, my capability expanded from managing a single factory’s SPI monitoring while at AVT McCormick to leading a team of thousands who monitored SPI populations at hundreds of Indian food factories and warehouses across the country.
My stint at PCI from 2000 to 2007 was a period of immense growth and transformation, both for me and for the Indian pest control industry through the changes I instituted at PCI.
My journey continued in 2007 when I established Pestinct Pro Solutions Private Limited (Pestinct) as part of the National Bulk Handling Corporation Private Limited.
Pestinct quickly grew to become India’s largest fumigator, protecting millions of tons of grain each year.
However, my time in the agri-commodity warehousing industry provided a different food safety perspective.
Harvested grain often has a high baseline infestation, and the hygiene standards at Indian grain warehouses can be challenging, making extensive pheromone monitoring less practical.
Finding hundreds, if not thousands, of adult SPIs on grain sacks, stacks, floors, and walls in warehouses is a common experience in India. Hence, in the Indian private grain storage warehouses, the focus is on large-scale fumigation.
While this chapter of my career was less about pheromone traps, it honed my expertise in different facets of stored product insect pest control, cementing my status as an industry leader.
When I left Pestinct in 2019, it was India’s second-largest pest control company, largely due to my efforts in building a large team with leadership in multiple business segments of the Indian pest control industry.
Giridhar Pai’s Journey from 1995 to 2025, dealing with stored product insect pheromone monitoring
The next chapter began in 2020 when I established Giridhar Pai Associates LLP (GPA).
Creating GPA was a deliberate move to return to my core belief: non-toxic, preventive pest management.
For years, colleagues and customers had been asking me about the Storgard range, which had disappeared from the Indian market between 2020 and 2023 despite a huge demand.
For many Indian customers, Storgard wasn’t just a product; it was a trusted name, with customers specifically asking for the Dome Traps and the specific Storgard lure acronyms like CB and CFB/RFB.
After two years of discussions with Trece, GPA successfully enabled the reintroduction of the Storgard range into India in January 2024.
Our initial focus was meeting the pent-up demand for these trusted products.
We quickly identified the Storgard Quick Change Dome Trap and the Ultra Combi Quick Change (UCQC) lure tray as the ideal solutions for the Indian market, enabling a seamless transition for customers to a superior and more economical monitoring system.
The UCQC new lure tray was a game-changer, monitoring five different beetles with pheromones and those five and seven others with kairomones.
In addition to Trece, GPA became the first Indian distributor for Japan’s Fuji Flavours Co. Ltd., bringing their famous New Serrico Trap to the broader food industry.
We’ve introduced this trap to numerous food and tobacco companies, extending its use beyond just one customer in the tobacco sector to a wide range of industries for monitoring cigarette beetle presence.
To cap off these achievements, we’ve created the first-ever product videos for these advanced SPI monitoring systems, demonstrating their features and ease of use.
It’s a source of great satisfaction to look back on this journey.
I began my journey as a novice, learning about common SPI pests, and ultimately became a trusted partner, reintroducing world-class SPI Pheromone products to an eager Indian market.
My professional story is inextricably linked to the journey of stored product insect management in India.
While I’ve been involved in many forms of pest control, the value of pheromone monitoring remains my passion.
It aligns perfectly with the GPA ethos: Interested in Prevention and Monitoring.
We continue to champion pheromone monitoring as a sustainable and intelligent solution for the food industry, guiding our partners toward a future of proactive and effective pest management.