WINTER HAVEN, FL. Back in February 2026, a state inspector walking the retail floor of Cheap Sale on South Lake Silver Drive found cartons of raw shelled eggs sitting on a cooler display shelf directly above ready-to-eat food, a setup that puts shoppers at risk of cross-contamination every time someone reaches into the case.
That was one of ten violations documented during the February 17 inspection of the convenience store, conducted by the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. One violation was classified as a priority concern. One was a repeat from a prior visit.
What Inspectors Found
The unlabeled product issue ran deeper than the eggs. The inspector found that various in-store packaged beans, sea salt, wheat, star anise, cloves, frozen raw goat meat, frozen raw red snapper, and frozen smoked meat were all being sold without labels showing the store name and address, net weight, or common name of the product.
The person in charge moved the dry goods to the back and managed to label some of them during the inspection. The frozen goat meat, red snapper, and other frozen meats were pulled from the retail floor and placed in back freezer units restricted to employee access only.
Prepackaged Oreo cookies and butter crackers were also on the retail floor without labels required for individual retail sale. The person in charge moved those to the back to be removed from the store for personal consumption.
The back room had its own problems. Articles were stored inside the hand sink, blocking it from use. There was no soap and no paper towels at that sink. The person in charge cleared the sink during the inspection, but the absence of soap and towels points to a handwashing station that had not been set up for routine use.
Ceiling tiles and walls in the back storage area were damaged. Heavy ice had accumulated on the inner walls of some freezer units in the retail area. Neither of those conditions was corrected during the visit.
The Repeat Violation
The finding that carried the most institutional weight was one that inspectors had already flagged before. Cheap Sale did not have a certified food protection manager, and no certificate was available for the inspector to review. That violation is marked as a repeat.
A certified food protection manager is someone who has passed an accredited food safety exam. Their presence in a food establishment is not a formality. It is the mechanism by which a store is supposed to have someone on staff who understands how foodborne illness spreads and how to prevent it.
The store also had no written procedure for handling a vomit or diarrhea event, and the person in charge could not fully answer questions about employee health reporting, exclusions, or restrictions. The inspector provided guidance handouts for both.
What These Violations Mean
The raw egg storage violation is a direct cross-contamination risk. Eggshells carry salmonella, and when cartons sit above open or loosely packaged ready-to-eat foods in a shared cooler, drips or contact can transfer bacteria to food that will never be cooked. The person in charge moved the eggs to the bottom shelf during the inspection, but the arrangement had existed long enough for an inspector to document it.
The unlabeled frozen meats, including raw goat and red snapper packaged in-store, present a different kind of problem. Without a label showing the product name, store name, and net weight, there is no reliable way for a customer to know what they are buying or where it came from. If someone became ill after eating one of those products, traceability back to the source would be significantly harder.
The blocked and unsupplied hand sink in the back room matters because that is where food handling and storage work happens. A sink that cannot be used, because it is full of stored items or lacks soap, is a sink that does not get used. Handwashing is the most basic interruption in the chain of contamination.
The absence of a certified food protection manager, now documented as a repeat violation, means the store has gone through at least two inspection cycles without correcting that gap.
The Longer Record
The inspection history at this location is short. FDACS records show one prior inspection on file, a focused inspection conducted on October 24, 2024, which found zero violations.
That clean result makes the February 2026 findings more notable, not less. A focused inspection covers a narrower scope than a full sanitation review, so the two visits are not directly comparable. But the jump from zero documented violations to ten, including a repeat, within roughly sixteen months suggests that conditions at the store changed or that the fuller inspection scope revealed problems the focused visit was not designed to catch.
The repeat violation on the certified food protection manager is the clearest thread between the two visits. Whether that requirement was flagged during the 2024 focused inspection or first cited at a different point is not reflected in the available records. What the record does show is that as of February 17, 2026, the store still did not have one.
The ice buildup on the inner walls of the freezer units and the structural damage to the back storage area were not corrected before the inspector left.