, FL. At 12:45 p.m. on September 4, 2026, a state inspector at Circle K #7510 found two tornado snack items still being sold to customers, one marked for discard at 10:21 a.m. and the other at 10:27 a.m., more than two hours past the point when they should have been pulled from the shelf.
That was not the only temperature problem the inspector documented that afternoon.
What Inspectors Found
Roller grill items placed at 12:40 p.m. were probed and registered 132 degrees Fahrenheit, three degrees below the minimum 135 degrees required to keep hot-held food safe. Management turned up the grill temperature, and a follow-up probe at 1:20 p.m. showed the items had reached 172 degrees.
The tornado snacks were a separate problem entirely. When a convenience store uses time rather than temperature as the control method for holding prepared food, state rules require each item to be marked with a discard time no more than four hours after it leaves temperature control. The cheesy pepper jack tornado and the french toast and sausage tornado had passed their marked discard times by more than two hours before the inspector flagged them. A manager removed both items from sale during the inspection.
The inspector also found a bucket stored inside the backroom handwash sink, blocking employee access. The bucket was removed during the inspection.
In the walk-in cooler, an employee drink was stored directly above ready-to-eat foods intended for customers. Management discarded the drink on the spot.
The Gaps in Food Safety Management
Beyond the specific temperature and time violations, the inspection revealed broader gaps in how the store manages food safety protocols.
The person in charge could not correctly answer questions about preventing foodborne illness, and management was unable to provide documentation that employees had been informed of their obligation to report illnesses transmissible through food. The inspector provided a Food Employee Reporting Agreement Form 1-B as guidance.
The store also lacked complete written procedures for holding items on time as a public health control, and had no written procedures for cleaning up vomiting and diarrheal events. The inspector provided a clean-up guidance document during the visit.
The annual food permit was not displayed when the inspector arrived. Management printed and posted it during the inspection.
Outside the store, cases of single-use items in a storage shed were not stored at least six inches off the floor, as required. The unisex restroom had no covered trash receptacle, a requirement for any restroom used by females.
The inspection recorded 10 violations in total: one priority, four priority foundation, and five basic. None were marked as repeat violations.
What These Violations Mean
The roller grill temperature finding is the most direct food safety risk in this inspection. Hot-held foods kept below 135 degrees enter a temperature range where bacteria multiply rapidly. Three degrees may sound like a small margin, but the requirement exists precisely because the difference between safe and unsafe is not always visible or detectable by taste. Anyone who bought a roller grill item in the window before the temperature was corrected consumed food that had not been held at the required safe temperature.
The time-marked tornado snacks represent a different but equally serious risk. When a store opts to use time rather than temperature as a safety control, the discard time is the only protection in place. Selling food more than two hours past its marked discard time means that safeguard had already expired. There is no way for a customer to know, looking at a packaged snack in a warmer, that its discard window had closed hours earlier.
The blocked handwash sink matters because it removes the most basic barrier between employees and the food they handle or stock. A sink blocked by a bucket is a sink that does not get used. The absence of written illness reporting agreements and the person-in-charge's inability to answer basic foodborne illness questions point to a training gap that underlies several of the other findings.
The Longer Record
The data available for this inspection does not include a count of prior inspections on record for Circle K #7510. What the September 4 inspection does show is that the store met sanitation requirements by the end of the visit, with several violations corrected on site, including the blocked handwash sink, the temperature issues, the out-of-date tornado snacks, the employee drink in the cooler, and the missing permit.
None of the 10 violations cited were marked as repeats, meaning inspectors had not flagged the same specific problems at a prior visit, at least not within the tracking window reflected in this record.
What was not corrected on site tells its own story. The missing written procedures for time-as-public-health-control, the absent vomiting and diarrheal event protocols, and the failure of the person in charge to demonstrate knowledge of foodborne illness prevention were all documented as unresolved at the time the inspector left the building.
