Rat Bait Panic Buying Leaves Shelves Empty

18th May 2026 ALJ330

Unusually high sales of rat bait has left shelves empty as both stores and suppliers struggle to keep up with increased demand.

Since the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) declared second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides a restricted chemical product on March 11, 2026, sales of rat bait have increased significantly, according to both stores and suppliers.

Sales have grown by ‘ridiculous amounts’ according to Ben Green, Merchandise Manager at Bade Ness Rural. “We can’t keep up,” he says, attributing these increased sales to panic buying due to the announcement of new regulations.

“People want to make sure they have some stock, so they are basically buying up and then once they see empty shelves, it’s like the toilet paper all over again.”

“Over the last two months it’s just gone off its head.”

Such a huge increase in sales has also resulted in issues obtaining supply. “We normally would order from the [CRT] warehouse, and they are consistently running out of stock so I’ve had to go direct to a supplier that we wouldn’t normally go to, and even they are out of stock,” says Green. “I’m having to be three or four orders ahead of ourselves to try and keep it coming in.”

Excessive sales combined with new label requirements have seen supplies run low as distributors try to keep up with the increased demand. “We saw immediately the very next day after that ruling had come out that people were going to stores and buying as much bait as they could possibly buy,” says Ryan Sentrine, Business Development Manager at Bainbridge Vet, who distribute rat bait Australia wide.

“We had two very big issues around that period, where it was baits and fuel. It was panic buying of baits and fuel.”

Even though suppliers are always keeping a close eye on the market, the increase in sales was something they could not have envisioned. “We didn’t anticipate that we would see that many baits go out in such a short amount of time. It was going out by the pallet load,” says Sentrine.

“We always make sure that we’ve got an adequate supply. We’ve always got to be forecasting… forecasting for mouse plagues, for environmental impacts that we might have. It’s great that we have a reliable bait that we can just grab from New Zealand.”

“We never saw this coming and I don’t think any of our customers did either, but we’ve just got to be as compliant as we can be.”

Mandatory relabelling changes has also seen delays in getting stock out to stores. Sentrine assures that more stock is on the way, but new label requirements mean the stock must be relabelled before being distributed.

“We have a container-load of bait on the ocean coming from New Zealand to us. Now we will get that container, we are probably very close to getting it, but we have to rebadge and rebrand that bait with the compliancy of the APVMA. That is a lot of unpacking and repacking. But if that’s what has to be done for us to be compliant, for us to have a more safer bait environment then we have to do it.”