90 August 2016 - Business View Caribbean
Rentokil Initial Jamaica Limited
Protecting people - enhancing lives
Rentokil Initial Jamaica Limited is a company that is ac-
tually made up of two different businesses. The Rento-
kil division is part of the global Rentokil Group, a pest
control company founded in London in 1925. Today,
that company employs over 70,000 people worldwide
and has operations in 40 countries. Rentokil came to
Jamaica in 1968 and opened a branch in downtown
Kingston and, according to its current Managing Direc-
tor, Maurice Goldson, by the 1980s, Rentokil Jamaica
had grown into the country’s premier pest control com-
pany.
For a time, pest control was the firm’s only business.
Meanwhile, Goldson says that Rentokil began to face
serious competition from what he calls “single-person
spray men,” individuals who purported to be experi-
enced pest control technicians in Jamaica’s unregu-
lated environment, but were really just interlopers who
could operate a spray gun. That and various “internal
challenges” within the company led it to scale down
the pest control aspect of its business, while ramping
up a hygiene services division, specializing in sanitact
units used for the disposal of feminine hygiene prod-
ucts in commercial building restrooms.
In 1996, Rentokil acquired the Initial Company, a towel
