How Ecolab built a better mousetrap for big spaces

Pests are more than annoying or gross. For a company with cavernous warehouses and factories, they are a threat to business.

St. Paul-based Ecolab has built a better mousetrap for customers that goes far beyond cheese and a spring-loaded bar.

Rodents can ruin equipment in a manufacturing factory or create unsanitary conditions in a food processing plant. And yet it’s time-consuming to check every traditional mousetrap in a building with tens of thousands of square feet of space.

That’s why Ecolab, Minnesota’s 10th-largest public company, has built a mousetrap with sensors that alert technicians when a trap is activated.

By connecting to the Internet of Things (IoT) — a term given to a network of physical devices that exchange data and automate actions — users of Ecolab’s fancy new trap can save a lot of time.

“This is all about efficiencies and how we add value with that time savings,” said Paul Reed, a digital operations manager who helped develop and roll out the new mousetraps.

Scientists from Ecolab’s pest elimination business developed the mousetrap at the company’s 115-acre research and development (R&D) center in Eagan that it shares with other business units.

Innovation and scale have helped to fuel St. Paul-based Ecolab’s success in its first 100 years; it has recorded more than 9,000 active patents since 2000.

The 40-year-old pest elimination business is a small unit for Ecolab, but it’s growing 8% a year and now accounting for over $1 billion of the company’s $15.7 billion in annual revenue. With a profit margin of more than 20%, higher than the company’s average, CEO Christophe Beck made it a standalone segment last year.

Innovation will play an even bigger role during its next century of business, Beck said. From 2021 to 2023, Ecolab increased R&D spending to about $189 million a year.

“I believe that Ecolab is going to be driven by two things in the future — first, breakthrough innovation, and second, deployed by the best team in the industry or in the world,” Beck said. “Most importantly is to further improve what we do for our customers.”

One key innovation goal, he said, is to expand the use of its Ecolab3D IoT technology used in the company’s devices to help customers conserve and recycle water.

At the Eagan lab where scientists study the life cycle of various pests, about a dozen scientists, including entomologists, figured out how to use Ecolab’s existing technologies to build an improved mousetrap by connecting it to the IoT.

“We’ve been able to do that because of the digital and AI technology that we’ve deployed for years in our [global water] business, where we have 50,000 devices that are connected today around the world,” Beck said.

The connected mousetrap is part of a program called Ecolab Pest Intelligence. When a mouse or rat passes over a sensor in one of Ecolab’s 350,000 connected devices, that information now gets relayed to a monitoring application and shared with clients.

Rather than spending the time checking traps, technicians can instead find where the rodents enter the buildings and develop remediation plans. Also, the information from the sensors eliminates the need, for example, to check the traps in ceilings and other hard-to-get-to places if they are empty.

A 2 million-square-foot food and beverage facility might have 300 to 400 traps installed, Reed said. That’s a lot of bending down and checking for one of the company’s service representatives. It’s taxing on the body and can take three to four hours.

Technicians now not only know what traps have been activated, but when it happened.

“Now we have the luxury of being able to tell what devices have had activity, concentrate on those devices, and with all that time saved do deeper inspection, root cause analysis, maybe provide preventative type treatments,” Reed said. “Or maybe it’s just spending more time talking with the customer and building that partnership.”

As with many products, Ecolab didn’t charge customers for the initial phases of the rollout and testing. As more data accumulates, though — allowing customers to better pinpoint problem areas — the company will charge for data services.

Reed said the initial customer feedback has been positive.

Food and drug manufacturers have zero tolerance for pests.

“So until an environment becomes pest-free, we keep working together with the customers, which makes us unique,” said Soraya Hlila, executive vice president and general manager of Ecolab’s Global Pest Elimination. “Good news is no news.”

The company promoted Hlila to lead its pest elimination segment in August. She was previously head of Ecolab’s institutional sales in Europe, and before that in several management roles for Johnson Controls and Schneider Electric.

Rodent traps were the first IoT-connected devices for pest elimination, but the team is already working on connected traps for cockroaches and flies.

“There is the device piece, but there is also a lot of innovation about understanding behavior patterns of the pest we’re looking at,” Hlila said.

To develop a connected device for cockroaches and flies, the team needs to understand the pest behavior, which is one reason they raise pests in the lab.

The team will measure itself not with the number of connected devices sold, but how much it can eliminate the problems for customers.

“It starts with the devices, but I think more importantly, and the reason we call it pest intelligence, is that what you do with that signal afterwards, how do you respond to it? How do you make sure the building is free of pests, and then, how do you help the customer prevent it from happening again,” said Julie Marquardt, vice president of R&D for the division.

This is the first article in Idea Lab, an occasional series about innovation. If you know of a recent breakthrough or development in Minnesota, email reporter Patrick Kennedy.