ORANGE CITY, FL. An employee at a bubble tea shop was not reporting symptoms of illness to management, state inspectors found during an August 6 visit to Face Tea at 2631 Enterprise Road, a finding that puts every customer who walked through the door at direct risk of a norovirus or similar outbreak. The shop logged six high-severity violations that day. It was not closed.
What Inspectors Found
The illness-reporting failure topped a list that also included improper handwashing technique, food found in poor condition or mislabeled, food contact surfaces that were not properly cleaned or sanitized, and a failure to correctly apply time as a public health control. Inspectors also cited the shop for offering raw or undercooked food items without the required consumer advisory on the menu.
Two intermediate violations accompanied the six high-severity findings. Multi-use utensils were not properly cleaned, and wiping cloths were being used improperly.
What These Violations Mean
The illness-reporting violation is the one that most directly endangered other people. When a food worker who is sick continues preparing drinks and food without alerting management, every item that employee touches becomes a potential transmission route. Norovirus, which spreads through contaminated food and surfaces, can sicken dozens of people from a single infected worker. The failure at Face Tea was not a matter of a worker being unaware of the rule; it is a management system failure, meaning the shop had no effective mechanism to catch it.
The handwashing technique violation compounds that risk. Inspectors do not cite this when an employee skips the sink entirely; they cite it when an employee goes through the motions incorrectly, leaving pathogens on hands that then touch cups, lids, straws, and drink ingredients. Combined with food contact surfaces that were not properly cleaned or sanitized, the shop had multiple overlapping pathways for bacterial transfer on the same day.
The time-control violation is a separate category of danger. Bubble tea shops frequently use time rather than refrigeration to keep certain ingredients safe, holding them at room temperature for a defined window before discarding them. When that system is not followed correctly, ingredients can sit in the bacterial growth zone, between 41 and 135 degrees, for far longer than safety standards allow. Customers have no way to know this is happening.
The missing consumer advisory matters most to the customers least equipped to absorb the risk. Pregnant women, elderly customers, and people with compromised immune systems are the populations the advisory is designed to warn. Without it, they cannot make an informed choice.
The Longer Record
August 6 was not a bad day at Face Tea. It was a consistent one.
State records show the shop has been inspected 11 times and has accumulated 79 total violations across its history. It has never been emergency-closed. Of the ten inspections before August 6, only one, a visit in June 2023, produced zero high-severity violations.
Every other inspection on record found high-severity violations. The March 2026 visit, just five months before this one, turned up seven high-severity violations and one intermediate. The June 2025 inspection also produced seven high-severity violations. The January 2025 visit found six high-severity violations, the same count as August 6.
The illness-reporting and handwashing violations that appeared in August are not isolated findings tied to a single bad shift. The shop's record shows a facility that has cycled through serious violations across multiple inspection cycles without a closure triggering a forced reset.
Still Open
Seventy-nine violations across 11 inspections. Six high-severity findings on August 6 alone, including an employee not reporting illness symptoms and food contact surfaces that were not properly sanitized.
Face Tea was not closed after the August 6 inspection.
Customers who visited the shop that week had no way to know what inspectors had documented inside.
