PEMBROKE PINES, FL. Back in January 2026, state inspectors visiting the Advanced Fresh Concepts seafood counter inside a Pembroke Pines grocery store found sushi packages sitting at internal temperatures between 46 and 48 degrees Fahrenheit, nearly three hours after they had been prepared and set out for shoppers to grab off the shelf.
The products included Big Wave poke bowls, California rolls, Summer rolls, and Spicy Wrap Salmon, all made in-store at 9 a.m. and placed in a self-service open-air cooler. When an inspector checked them with a probe thermometer at 11:50 a.m., not one package was holding at a safe temperature.
Every package was pulled from the display and placed in a freezer to bring temperatures down.
What Inspectors Found
VIOLATIONS CITED
CORRECTIVE ACTION TAKEN
The second violation involved how products were arranged inside the same self-serve reach-in cooler. Multiple containers of raw store-made bowls and sushi rolls containing tuna and salmon were stored directly above ready-to-eat Summer rolls, California rolls, and vegetable rolls. The inspector noted the arrangement in the retail area and required staff to move the items during the visit.
Both violations were priority-level findings. Neither had been seen at this location before, according to state records.
What These Violations Mean
The temperature finding is the more acute concern of the two. Florida's food safety rules require time-and-temperature control foods, including raw or prepared seafood, to be held at 41 degrees Fahrenheit or below. Sushi sitting at 46 to 48 degrees is not a marginal miss. At those temperatures, bacteria including Staphylococcus aureus and certain strains of Salmonella can multiply at a rate that makes food genuinely dangerous within hours, not days.
The products at the Advanced Fresh Concepts counter had been out for nearly three hours when inspectors arrived. There is no way to know how long the cooler had been failing to hold temperature before that point.
The cross-contamination violation, raw tuna and salmon stored above ready-to-eat rolls, carries a different but equally serious risk. Raw fish can harbor pathogens including Listeria and Salmonella. When raw product is positioned above finished, ready-to-eat food in a shared cooler, any drip or leak from the raw containers lands directly on food a customer will eat without further cooking. That is the precise scenario food safety rules are designed to prevent.
For a self-service counter where shoppers reach in and select their own packages, the stakes are higher than in a staffed deli. There is no employee between the product and the customer.
The Longer Record
The January 2026 inspection was not the first time state regulators have looked at this counter. Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services records show eight prior inspections at this location going back to June 2022.
Seven of those eight visits produced zero violations. The one exception was a single violation recorded in June 2022, the earliest inspection in the dataset. Every inspection since then, including focused inspections in September 2024, May 2024, July 2025, and January 2026, came back clean until the January 5 visit.
That record cuts two ways. On one hand, a counter that has passed seven of nine inspections with no violations is not a chronic offender. On the other hand, the January findings were not minor administrative items. Two priority violations at a seafood counter that had been sailing through inspections raises the question of whether the open-air self-service cooler was performing consistently or whether January's reading caught a problem that had been developing quietly.
The March 2026 and January 20, 2026 focused inspections both came back clean, which suggests the issues documented on January 5 were addressed and did not persist into subsequent visits.
Where Things Stood
Both violations were noted as corrected on site during the January 5 inspection. The raw items were repositioned in the cooler. The sushi packages were removed from the display and placed in the freezer, and an inspector verified the temperatures after cooling.
What the record does not show is whether the open-air cooler itself was repaired or replaced. The temperature failure was not a matter of product being left out carelessly. The sushi was inside a cooler unit that was simply not keeping food cold enough. Correcting the immediate problem by moving the product addresses the symptom. Whether the equipment failure that caused sushi to reach 48 degrees was ever fixed is not documented in the inspection record.
The counter passed its next inspection on January 20, fifteen days later, with zero violations.