, FL. Raw bacon was sitting on a shelf above ready-to-eat items inside Jefferson Marathon when a state inspector walked through the store on September 22, according to Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services records.
The inspector's own notes describe the scene plainly: "raw bacon was stored above ready to eat items." A store employee moved the bacon to the bottom shelf before the inspector left, but the violation had already been recorded.
What Inspectors Found
The inspection turned up four violations in total, including two classified as priority-level concerns. The second priority finding involved Little Debbie snack cakes being sold individually without the labeling required by law. The inspector noted that "Oatmeal cream, swiss rolls, nutty buddy's, cookies" from the Little Debbie line were "not labeled for individual sale." The store manager voluntarily discarded the cakes on the spot.
The walk-in cooler had broken floor tiles, a basic maintenance violation that remained unresolved when the inspector left.
The Repeat Violation
The most persistent problem documented in this inspection was not the raw meat or the unlabeled snack cakes. It was a certification lapse that inspectors have flagged before.
Jefferson Marathon does not have a certified food protection manager who has passed the required examination, and the store could not produce a certificate when the inspector asked. That violation is marked repeat, meaning state records show the same deficiency was cited in a prior inspection.
The inspector's note is brief but direct: "Certified food protection managers certificate was not available."
What These Violations Mean
Storing raw animal food above ready-to-eat items is one of the most direct paths to cross-contamination in any food retail setting. Raw bacon can carry Salmonella and other pathogens. When it sits above items that will not be cooked before a customer eats them, any drip or leak transfers bacteria directly onto food with no kill step remaining. The inspector caught the problem at Jefferson Marathon and the bacon was moved, but the positioning was not an accident of a single moment. Someone had stocked the shelf that way.
The unlabeled Little Debbie snack cakes carry a different kind of risk. Federal law under 21 CFR requires that individually sold packaged food carry nutrition and ingredient labeling. When that labeling is absent, customers with food allergies or dietary restrictions have no way to know what is in what they are buying. The manager discarded the items, but the store had been selling them without required labels before the inspector arrived.
The repeat certification violation matters because a certified food protection manager is the person responsible for knowing and enforcing safe food handling practices throughout a facility. When that role is either vacant or unverified, the safeguards that prevent the other violations on this list from happening in the first place are weakened. The fact that inspectors have noted this absence before and the certificate was still not available on September 22 means the gap has not been closed.
The Longer Record
The data available for this inspection does not include a count of prior inspections on record for Jefferson Marathon, which limits how far back this pattern can be traced. What the record does show is that at least one of the four violations cited on September 22 is explicitly marked as a repeat, meaning the certification problem is not new to this location.
The September 22 inspection concluded with the store meeting sanitation requirements overall, meaning it was not ordered closed and did not fail the inspection outright. But two of the four violations were not corrected before the inspector left. The broken floor tiles in the walk-in cooler remained as documented. The missing food protection manager certification remained unresolved.
Those two open items are the ones that follow the store forward. The raw bacon was moved. The Little Debbie cakes were thrown out. The floor is still broken, and the certificate is still not on the wall.
