, FL. El Caribe Minimarket II Llc. was operating without a valid food permit when a Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services inspector walked through the door on September 22, a violation that triggered the inspection and exposed five additional problems inside the store, including no employee health policy and no soap at the meat cutting sink.
The permit violation alone carries a statutory citation under Florida law. According to the inspector's notes, an application for a food permit had been submitted, but the store had not yet completed the process. The inspector directed the business to remit payment of the appropriate fee within 10 days.
What Inspectors Found
The inspection turned up six violations in total. The most serious, classified as a priority violation, was the absence of any employee health policy. The inspector noted: "No employee health policy implemented at food establishment to report information as related to symptoms or diagnosis of diseases that are transmissible through food."
That finding was not corrected on site. The inspector provided employee health guidelines and a reporting agreement, but the store left the inspection without a functioning system for identifying sick workers before they handle food.
At the meat cutting area, the inspector found no soap and no paper towels at the hand sink. That violation was corrected during the visit after soap and paper towels were obtained and placed at the sink.
The ware wash area had two related problems. There was no sanitizer at the three-compartment sink and no chemical test strips to measure sanitizer concentration. Both were corrected on site after chlorine sanitizer and test strips were obtained and provided. The store also lacked a written plan for handling vomiting and diarrheal events, a guidance document for which was provided during the inspection but not formally implemented before inspectors left.
What These Violations Mean
The absence of an employee health policy is not a paperwork problem. It means there is no formal system requiring workers who are sick, or who have been diagnosed with a foodborne illness, to report that information before handling the food that customers buy and take home. In a grocery store with a meat cutting area, that gap is a direct transmission route.
Soap and paper towels missing from the meat cutting sink compounds that risk. Meat cutting is one of the highest-contamination tasks in any food retail environment. Workers who handle raw meat and cannot wash their hands properly carry that contamination to every surface, product, and package they touch afterward.
The ware wash violations tell a related story. A three-compartment sink without sanitizer is not sanitizing anything. Test strips exist specifically to verify that sanitizer concentration is high enough to kill pathogens. Without them, a store has no way to confirm that the equipment and utensils used to cut, wrap, and prepare food are actually clean.
Operating without a valid food permit means the store was not legally authorized to sell food at the time of inspection. It also means the routine oversight that comes with a permit, including scheduled inspections, was not in place.
The Longer Record
The data available for this inspection does not include a prior inspection count for El Caribe Minimarket II. The September 22 visit was triggered specifically because the store was operating without a valid food permit, which means it may not have accumulated a standard inspection history under FDACS oversight.
What the record does show is that the store was open and selling food without the legal authorization to do so. The permit application had been submitted, but the fee had not been paid and the permit had not been issued. The inspection that followed found problems in multiple areas of the store, not just the permit status.
None of the six violations were marked as repeats. That is consistent with a facility that has not been through the standard inspection cycle. It does not mean the problems were new.
What Remains Unresolved
Three of the six violations found at El Caribe Minimarket II were not corrected during the inspection. The store left without a functioning employee health policy, without a written plan for vomiting and diarrheal events, and without a valid food permit.
The permit can be resolved by remitting payment within 10 days, according to the inspector's notes. The health policy and the written cleanup plan require the store to implement procedures, not just purchase a product off a shelf. As of the inspection date, neither was in place.
