16 February 2024: In the last couple of weeks, there has been significant interest in reports of pests at Countdown stores. We take food safety and pest control seriously and apologise to our customers for the distress or inconvenience these reports may have caused.

Pests are a common challenge in food environments, especially in the warm summer months. While it is normal for them to attempt to enter food premises, it’s our responsibility to do everything possible to keep them out and remove them if they do enter.

Supported by industry leaders in pest management, Rentokil, as well as NZ Food Safety, we have pest management plans in place in every one of our 194 stores across the country. However recent events have highlighted that there are improvements we can make to ensure our processes and procedures are followed. What we have seen play out in the last couple of weeks is not acceptable to us or to our customers.

These are some of the actions we have taking to ensure that our pest management is performing as it should be:

We have issued a food safety alert to all of our teams to remind them of our practices and procedures when dealing with pests. Our operations senior leadership team is visiting all stores to follow up in person.

We are reviewing how we work with our pest control contractor, Rentokil, to ensure that any pest management challenges are being appropriately escalated and addressed, and that the right information is accessible.

We are reviewing our internal escalation processes to ensure that our team are confident in raising and escalating concerns about pest management.

Director of Stores, Jason Stockill, supported by our Head of Food Safety is leading implementation of the above actions.