PALMETTO BAY, FL. Inspectors who walked into Babe's Meat & Counter on SW 156th Street on September 11 found a butcher shop selling meat and fish with no documented procedures to destroy parasites, no written employee health policy, and no person in charge present or performing duties. The facility collected six high-severity violations and one intermediate violation that day. It was never closed.
What Inspectors Found
The parasite destruction violation is particularly pointed at a meat counter. Fish sold for raw or undercooked consumption requires documented freezing or cooking protocols to kill parasites including Anisakis and tapeworm larvae. Without those procedures in place, there is no verifiable step between the fish case and the customer's plate.
The food contact surface violation compounds that risk. Cutting boards, slicers, and prep surfaces at a butcher shop cycle through raw proteins continuously. When those surfaces are not properly cleaned and sanitized between uses, bacteria from one product transfer to the next.
Toxic chemicals stored improperly or without labels rounded out a picture of broad systemic failure on a single inspection day.
The Illness Policy Breakdown
Two of the six high-severity violations on September 11 addressed the same underlying problem: the facility had no functioning employee health system. Inspectors cited both the absence of an adequate written health policy and the failure of employees to report illness symptoms.
Those are not the same violation. One is a paperwork failure. The other means sick workers were present and no reporting mechanism caught it.
Together, they describe a shop where a food handler could come to work with Norovirus or Salmonella symptoms and face no formal obligation to disclose that to management, partly because there was no management present to receive the disclosure. The person-in-charge violation documents exactly that gap.
What These Violations Mean
Parasite destruction failures at a meat counter carry direct consequences for customers who purchase fish or pork for raw or lightly cooked preparations. Anisakis, a roundworm found in many marine fish, causes severe abdominal pain and can require surgical removal if ingested alive. Trichinella, found in undercooked pork, causes trichinosis. Proper freezing at documented temperatures and durations kills these organisms. Without records showing those steps occurred, there is no way to confirm they did.
The employee illness violations are not bureaucratic. Norovirus causes an estimated 20 million illnesses in the United States each year, and food workers are among the most common transmission vectors. A written health policy is the mechanism that keeps a symptomatic employee out of a kitchen. At Babe's Meat & Counter on September 11, that mechanism was absent, and no manager was on duty to enforce it informally either.
Improperly stored or unlabeled toxic chemicals present a different category of risk. A chemical container stored near or above food, or mislabeled so that it is mistaken for a food-safe product, can contaminate food directly and acutely. The sewage disposal violation adds a third pathway: improper wastewater handling introduces fecal bacteria into the facility environment.
The Longer Record
The September 11 inspection was not an aberration. State records show Babe's Meat & Counter has been inspected five times total, accumulating 28 violations across those visits.
The most comparable prior inspection came on February 19, when inspectors cited eight high-severity violations and one intermediate, a worse single-day tally than September 11 but similar in character. The facility has logged high-severity violations on every inspection in its recorded history, including two high-severity citations each on April 23 and September 26 of last year.
The facility has never been emergency-closed.
A follow-up inspection six days after the September 11 visit, on September 17, found two high-severity violations still present. The record does not show that the facility was ever shuttered between those two dates, meaning customers continued to shop at a butcher counter where parasite destruction procedures, employee health policies, and sanitation of food contact surfaces had all been flagged as high-severity failures less than a week earlier.
Five inspections. Twenty-eight violations. High-severity citations at every single visit. And on September 11, 2026, with six high-severity violations documented in a single walk-through of a shop that handles raw meat and fish, Babe's Meat & Counter remained open for business.
