MIDDLEBURG, FL. Inspectors visiting Love Donuts and Smoothie on Blanding Boulevard on September 30, 2026 found that the shop was sourcing food from unapproved or unknown suppliers, meaning any customer who walked in that day had no way of knowing whether what they ate had ever passed a federal safety inspection.
That single violation was one of seven high-severity citations the state logged that afternoon at the Middleburg shop. The facility was not closed.
What Inspectors Found
The unapproved food source violation stood alongside a finding that the shop had no written employee health policy and that at least one employee was not reporting illness symptoms to management. Those two violations together describe a workplace with no formal system for keeping sick workers away from food.
Inspectors also cited improper handwashing technique. That is distinct from not washing hands at all. An employee can approach the sink, run the water, and still leave pathogens on their hands if the technique is wrong, and that employee then touches every surface and every order that follows.
Food contact surfaces were not properly cleaned or sanitized. The inspector also cited inadequate shell stock identification records, a violation that applies to oysters, clams, and mussels. Without proper tagging and paperwork on shellfish, there is no way to trace an illness back to a harvest location if a customer gets sick. The shop also had no consumer advisory posted for raw or undercooked menu items.
Two intermediate violations rounded out the report: inadequate cooling and cold holding equipment, and inadequate ventilation and lighting.
What These Violations Mean
The combination of no health policy and an employee not reporting illness symptoms is not a paperwork problem. Norovirus, the most common cause of foodborne illness outbreaks in the United States, spreads almost exclusively through infected food workers who continue preparing and handling food while sick. A written policy is the mechanism that tells workers they are required to report symptoms and stay home. Without one, there is no documented standard, and no accountability when someone comes to work ill.
The food from unapproved sources violation adds a layer of risk that most customers would not anticipate at a donut shop. USDA and FDA inspections exist to catch contamination, including Listeria and Salmonella, before food reaches a commercial kitchen. When a supplier is unapproved or unknown, that entire inspection chain is absent.
The inadequate cold holding equipment citation compounds the temperature picture. Equipment that cannot maintain required temperatures allows food to drift into the range where bacterial growth accelerates, between 41 and 135 degrees Fahrenheit. At Love Donuts and Smoothie, the inspector found that the equipment itself was the problem, not just how it was being used.
Improperly sanitized food contact surfaces are a direct transfer route for whatever pathogens are present in the kitchen. Cutting boards, prep surfaces, and utensils that are not properly cleaned between uses carry contamination from one food item to the next.
The Longer Record
September 30, 2026 was not the shop's first difficult inspection. State records show five prior inspections dating to January 2023, and the current visit is the sixth on record. Across all six inspections, the facility has accumulated 38 total violations.
The pattern is not uniform, but it is persistent. Two inspections, in December 2023 and January 2023, produced zero high-severity violations. Every other visit found high-severity citations. The August 2025 inspection logged 3 high and 3 intermediate violations. The September 2024 inspection logged 3 high and 5 intermediate violations. The October 2023 inspection logged 3 high and 4 intermediate violations.
The September 2026 inspection, with 7 high-severity violations, is the worst on record for this location by a significant margin. It more than doubled the high-severity count from any prior visit.
The shop has never been emergency-closed. The violations documented in the three years before this inspection, repeated high-severity findings across food safety fundamentals, did not produce a closure order. Neither did seven high-severity violations on a single afternoon in September 2026.
The Facility Remained Open
State inspectors left Love Donuts and Smoothie open after documenting that the shop was sourcing food from unknown suppliers, had no system to keep sick workers out of the kitchen, and was operating with food contact surfaces that were not properly sanitized.
The shop on Blanding Boulevard had been cited for high-severity violations in four of its five previous inspections. On the sixth, it set a new record for its worst single-day finding.
It was not closed.
