FLORIDA. The Chick-fil-A at 326 SE 1st Ave in Florida City drew seven high-severity violations in a single inspection window this summer, more than any other Chick-fil-A location in Florida during the July 10 through October 7, 2026 review period.
Those seven violations included no person in charge present or performing duties, no written employee health policy, employees not reporting illness symptoms, improper handwashing technique, food in poor condition or mislabeled, inadequate shell stock identification, and no consumer advisory for raw or undercooked foods. An intermediate violation for improper sewage or wastewater disposal rounded out the inspection.
That is not a list of paperwork oversights.
The Violations
The Chick-fil-A on W Irlo Bronson Memorial Highway in Kissimmee recorded five high-severity violations with no intermediate violations at all, a combination that signals concentrated serious failures rather than scattered minor ones. Inspectors cited food from an unapproved or unknown source, inadequate shell stock records, food contact surfaces not properly cleaned or sanitized, food not cooked to the required minimum temperature, and toxic substances improperly identified, stored, or used.
The Chick-fil-A at 14020 Lunar Dr in Jacksonville also drew five high-severity violations, including inadequate shell stock records, improperly cleaned food contact surfaces, no consumer advisory for raw or undercooked foods, toxic chemicals improperly stored or labeled, and no allergen awareness demonstrated.
Two violations at the Kissimmee location stand out together: food from an unapproved source paired with food not cooked to the required minimum temperature. If the origin of a food item is unknown and it is also undercooked, there is no safety net at either end of the supply chain.
A Chain-Wide Pattern
Across all 216 Chick-fil-A locations in Florida, inspectors have conducted 4,075 inspections on record, and the chain holds a 95.83 percent pass rate. The average inspection turns up 3.42 violations.
No Florida Chick-fil-A location was emergency-closed during this period.
But the pass rate describes the whole chain. The ten locations flagged here sit well outside that average, and several share the same violation categories across inspections conducted weeks apart and hundreds of miles from each other.
Four of the ten locations, Florida City, Chick-fil-A Mandarin at 3280 Oak Bluff Ln in Jacksonville, Chick-fil-A Sand Lake Road at 7333 W Sand Lake Rd in Orlando, and Chick-fil-A at 3166 Daniels Rd in Winter Garden, were all cited for employees not reporting illness symptoms or for no consumer advisory for raw or undercooked foods, or both.
Improper sewage or wastewater disposal appeared as an intermediate violation at five separate locations: Florida City, Winter Garden, Chick-fil-A Sanford at 4590 W State Rd 46, Chick-fil-A at 1541 County Rd 220 in Fleming Island, and Chick-fil-A 04625 at 9500 McKenna Dr in Orlando.
Toxic chemical storage failures appeared at four locations: Winter Garden, Jacksonville Lunar Drive, Sanford, and Fleming Island.
What These Violations Mean
The cluster of illness-reporting failures across Florida City, Winter Garden, and Chick-fil-A Mandarin in Jacksonville describes a specific danger. When a food worker comes in sick and no policy exists requiring them to report symptoms, and no manager is present to enforce one, the transmission path from an infected employee to a customer's food is direct. Norovirus, which causes the majority of foodborne illness outbreaks in restaurant settings, spreads through exactly this mechanism. The Florida City location had all three of these failures in a single inspection: no manager, no written health policy, and employees not reporting symptoms.
The improper handwashing technique violation at Florida City and Fleming Island compounds this. A worker who attempts to wash their hands but uses an inadequate technique, too brief, skipping surfaces, or using improper water temperature, leaves pathogens on their hands. The attempt itself can create a false sense of compliance.
Food from unapproved sources, cited at the Kissimmee and Orlando McKenna Drive locations, removes the traceability that makes outbreak investigations possible. When a customer gets sick and inspectors need to identify the contaminated ingredient, an unknown or unapproved source means there is no supply chain record to follow. At the Kissimmee location, that unapproved sourcing was paired with a food contact surface sanitation failure, meaning the food arrived without documentation and was then handled on surfaces that inspectors found inadequately cleaned.
Allergen awareness failures at Jacksonville Lunar Drive, Sanford, and Fleming Island carry a different kind of urgency. Food allergies send roughly 30,000 Americans to emergency rooms each year. When staff cannot demonstrate awareness of allergens present in the food they are preparing and serving, customers with allergies are relying on a safety system that inspectors found absent.
The Longer Record
The statewide inspection record for Chick-fil-A in Florida spans 4,075 inspections across 216 locations. That volume means the chain has been scrutinized extensively, and the locations that surface in a 90-day worst-performers list are doing so against a backdrop of thousands of routine inspections that produced no comparable findings.
The Sanford location drew four high-severity and three intermediate violations, including two separate toxic substance citations, one for improperly stored or labeled chemicals and one for toxic substances improperly identified, stored, or used, alongside a multi-use utensil cleaning failure and a sewage disposal problem. Seven total violations, spread across four distinct risk categories, suggests systemic rather than isolated failure.
The Chick-fil-A Mandarin location in Jacksonville recorded a person in charge not present alongside employees not reporting illness symptoms and improperly cleaned food contact surfaces. The management absence and the illness-reporting failure appearing together is a documented risk multiplier: CDC data cited in inspection records indicates establishments without active managerial control accumulate critical violations at three times the rate of managed facilities.
The Chick-fil-A at Cypress Creek Town Center at 2349 Sun Vista Dr in Lutz recorded the fewest violations of the ten, two high-severity and two intermediate. One of those high-severity violations was food not cooked to the required minimum temperature. At a chain whose signature product is a chicken sandwich, an undercooking violation is not incidental. Salmonella in poultry survives below 165 degrees Fahrenheit. The Lutz location also drew a citation for inadequate shell stock identification, the same violation that appeared at Florida City, Kissimmee, Jacksonville Lunar Drive, and Sand Lake Road in Orlando.
Shell stock identification failures appeared at five of the ten flagged locations. Chick-fil-A is not a seafood restaurant. The breadth of that citation across geographically dispersed locations, Florida City, Kissimmee, Jacksonville, Orlando, and Lutz, has not been publicly explained by the chain.
