Dewey Pest & Termite ControlEnvironmental Security Since 1929

A truck pulls up. The bugs already lost.

Somewhere in California this morning, a white Dewey truck rolled into a driveway. A technician knocked, checked the eaves, found the mud tubes a homeowner had walked past for two years, and quietly went to work. Multiply that by a few hundred trucks across more than 30 branches, and you have the thing Dewey Pest & Termite Control actually is: not a brand, not an app, but a daily, unglamorous promise that the small creatures in your walls are someone else's problem now.

The company is family-owned, headquartered in Pasadena, and roughly 750 people strong. It treats ants and gophers and black widows with the same procedural calm. It has been doing this since 1929 - which means it was killing termites before antibiotics were common and is still killing them in the age of the smart doorbell. The pests evolve. So, slowly, does Dewey.

The enemy you don't see until the wall gives.

Termites are the perfect adversary for a business. They are silent, patient, and almost invisible until the damage is structural and the repair bill is large. A homeowner can keep a tidy house, pay every bill on time, and still wake up one day to a porch step that crumbles underfoot. The pest problem is not a hygiene problem. It is an information problem - you don't know what's living with you until it's too late.

That gap, between the infestation and the discovery, is the entire reason Dewey exists. Ray M. Dewey understood it in 1929, when "pest control" was mostly a man with a sprayer and a strong stomach. The science has changed. The gap has not. People still cannot see what's eating their house.

One man in 1929, betting on patience.

Ray M. Dewey started with a one-man operation in the year the stock market chose to collapse - not, on paper, the ideal moment to launch anything. His bet was simple and a little stubborn: that Californians would always need someone to handle the things they couldn't, and that trust, built one house at a time, would outlast any economic weather.

The bet held. In July 1977, his son Steven R. Dewey bought the company from his father and renamed it Dewey Services, Inc. - the same name on the trucks today. The handoff was less a sale than a continuation, which is the polite way a family business says "we're not going anywhere." The one man became hundreds. The single sprayer became a fleet, a training program, and a network of branches stretching across the state.

A method, not a magic spray.

What Dewey sells is harder to bottle than poison. It sells a process: inspect, identify, exclude, treat, monitor. The fancy name is Integrated Pest Management - IPM - and the idea behind it is that you can usually win the war against pests without carpet-bombing the house. Find the entry points. Seal them. Use targeted treatments where they count. Check back. It is less dramatic than a fumigation tent and, most of the time, smarter.

When the situation calls for drama, Dewey has that too. For established termite colonies, the company offers whole-house fumigation - the full tent-over-the-house spectacle - along with targeted options like Termidor, wood repair, and bait stations. The portfolio runs from the surgical to the theatrical, which is roughly the range termites force you into.

Ninety-six years is its own footnote.

Most proof points are numbers in a deck. Dewey's proof is that it is still here. Pest control is a brutally competitive, low-margin, easily-undercut business, full of one-truck operators and national giants like Terminix and Orkin. Surviving in it since 1929 - through the Depression, a dozen recessions, and the entire history of the modern chemical industry - is not luck. It is a customer base that keeps calling back.

The footprint tells the same story. More than 30 branches. Roughly 750 employees. Commercial contracts in the places that get inspected hardest - restaurants, food processors, hospitals, hotels, and schools - where a failed pest audit is not an inconvenience but a shutdown. Those customers do not pick a vendor for charm. They pick the one that passes.

Kill the pest, spare the planet.

Pest control has an obvious tension at its core: the tools that kill bugs can also harm the people, pets, and environment you're trying to protect. Dewey's stated answer is to treat that tension as the job, not a footnote - to deliver effective control through the responsible application of approved materials, with products it describes as pet-, child-, and earth-friendly.

That is the quiet content of "Environmental Security Since 1929." The phrase is not really about bugs. It is about the boring, essential work of making a space safe to live in without trading one hazard for another. A century in, that remains the hard part - and the part Dewey built a company around.

The bugs are not retiring. Neither is Dewey.

Climate shifts are pushing pests into new ranges and longer seasons. Bed bugs travel further; termites stay active longer; mosquitoes show up in places that used to be safe. The information gap - the distance between an infestation and the moment you notice it - is not closing. If anything, a warming, more mobile California widens it.

Which is the unglamorous reason a 1929 company is also a tomorrow company. The need it serves is structural, recurring, and faintly eternal. As long as people build houses out of wood and live near nature, something will try to move in, and someone will have to handle it calmly.

So picture that driveway again. The white truck. The technician at the eaves, finding the mud tubes the homeowner walked past for two years. He treats the entry points, sets the bait, and writes up the inspection. The house is quiet again - not because the bugs gave up, but because, since 1929, this has been somebody's job. The homeowner goes back inside and forgets the whole thing. That forgetting is the product. Dewey has been selling it for 96 years.