HIGH SPRINGS, FL. Back in January 2026, a state inspector walked into Jiffy 1580 on High Springs and found the Sbarro food station inside operating without a timer or written records to track when hot-held stromboli needed to be thrown out, a violation of the store's own written food safety policy.
The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services conducted the inspection on January 23, 2026, as part of a failure-to-renew food permit review. The store ultimately met sanitation inspection requirements, but not before inspectors documented 12 violations across the convenience store's retail area, ice bagging operation, and the Sbarro station inside.
What Inspectors Found
The stromboli finding was the most operationally serious. The inspector noted the food establishment did not have a timer or written documentation indicating when time had started or when it had passed, which would prompt staff to discard the product. The store's own policy required exactly that kind of recordkeeping.
The inspector verified the stromboli temperatures on site and confirmed the product was above 135 degrees Fahrenheit, the minimum required for hot-held food. A new timer was set before the inspection concluded.
The person in charge at the Sbarro station also incorrectly answered questions about the store's employee health policy, a finding the inspector flagged as a priority foundation violation. Knowing when to exclude a sick employee from food handling is a basic requirement, and the inspection record shows the person responsible for that call could not demonstrate they understood it.
No hand-drying materials were available at the hand wash station in the ice room, and hand wash signage was missing at two separate stations: one in the retail ice bagging area and one at the Sbarro hand wash station adjacent to the ware washing sink. Both signs were provided and posted before the inspector left.
The Sbarro prep cooler held food for pizza and toppings with no visible thermometer inside. The same was true of an island retail cooler in the main store. The inspector measured ambient air temperatures at 37 degrees Fahrenheit in the prep cooler and 35 degrees in the retail cooler, both within safe range, but without a visible thermometer, employees have no way to catch a cooler that is drifting out of range before it becomes a problem.
Clean food containers at the Sbarro station were wet-nesting, meaning they had been stacked while still damp. The containers were pulled from storage, rewashed, and properly air-dried before the inspection ended.
The inspector also noted a slow leak at the faucet of the ware wash sink, a hole in the ceiling above the ice machine, a hand wash station not sealed to the wall, and a scraper stored between the wall and the food preparation sink where it was exposed to splash and contamination. No trash can was present in the ice processing room.
What These Violations Mean
The stromboli tracking failure is the kind of violation that is easy to dismiss as paperwork but carries real risk. When a food establishment uses time rather than temperature as its safety control, the written log is the only safeguard. Without a timer or a start time recorded, there is no way to know how long a product has been sitting, and no trigger to pull it before bacteria can multiply to dangerous levels. The Sbarro station inside Jiffy 1580 was operating on that basis, without the documentation its own policy required.
The person-in-charge finding compounds that concern. Employee health policies exist to prevent workers with contagious illnesses from handling food. When the person responsible for enforcing that policy cannot correctly explain it to an inspector, the policy exists on paper only.
Wet-nesting is less dramatic but consistently cited by inspectors for a reason. Stacking damp containers traps moisture between surfaces, creating conditions where bacteria survive sanitizing and transfer to the next food that touches the container. The containers at the Sbarro station were corrected on site, but the practice had been ongoing long enough to be caught.
The missing thermometers in both coolers matter because temperature failures are silent. A cooler running at 45 degrees instead of 38 degrees looks identical to one running correctly, and without a thermometer, staff have no way to detect the drift.
The Longer Record
This was not the first time inspectors found problems at this location. The inspection history at Jiffy 1580 goes back to at least October 2022, when an inspection turned up 17 violations and required a re-inspection before the store could continue operating.
A November 2022 inspection found four violations. Three focused inspections in late 2022 and early 2023 recorded zero violations each, suggesting the store had stabilized. But a November 2023 inspection found 13 violations, and a January 2025 inspection found 10 violations, including one repeat citation.
The January 2026 inspection brought the count to 12 violations, with none marked as repeats from the prior visit. That is a mild technical improvement, but the trajectory across seven inspections is not one of consistent correction. The store has oscillated between clean focused visits and double-digit violation counts on full inspections since 2022.
The hole in the ceiling above the ice machine was still unresolved at the close of the January 2026 inspection.