STUART, FL. Back in April 2026, a state inspector visiting Oumi Sushi on Stuart, a seafood market retail operation, found the shop using a pH calibration buffer that had expired in November 2025, more than four months before the April 3 visit.
That expired buffer was part of a wider breakdown in the facility's HACCP plan, the written food safety protocol the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services had specifically approved for the shop. The inspection turned up six total violations, two of them priority-level, and one marked as a repeat.
What Inspectors Found
The HACCP violations alone covered four distinct failures. The shop's approved plan requires 2-ounce cups for the pH calibration process; inspectors found 4-ounce cups in use instead. Those cups are also required to be labeled, a step the inspector noted was skipped entirely.
The rice pH check itself was done wrong. The approved plan calls for one part rice mixed with two parts distilled water; inspectors found staff mixing one part rice with one part distilled water. And the verification log, which the HACCP plan requires to be reviewed and signed monthly, had not been completed since March 5, 2026, nearly a month before the inspection.
The sushi rolls were a separate concern. California rolls, tuna tataki rolls, and spicy salmon and tuna sushi, all prepared three hours before the inspection, were sitting in an open-air reach-in customer cooler with internal temperatures between 43 and 47 degrees Fahrenheit. The inspector had all out-of-temperature product moved to the walk-in freezer to continue cooling, and verified the temperature before leaving.
In the back of the store, ice had built up on the floor and on condenser units inside the walk-in freezer. Old food debris had accumulated on the kitchen floor between coolers and walls.
What These Violations Mean
The HACCP plan deviation is the most consequential finding here, and the one that requires the most explanation for shoppers. Oumi Sushi holds a special process approval from the state, which allows it to prepare sushi rice using an acidification method designed to prevent the growth of harmful bacteria. That process only works if it is followed exactly as written and verified with accurate, unexpired calibration tools.
Using an expired pH buffer means the shop had no reliable way to confirm the rice was acidified to a safe level. A buffer expired since November 2025 cannot be trusted to give an accurate reading. If the pH check is wrong, the acidification step that makes the rice safe to hold at room temperature may not have worked, and neither the staff nor the inspector could know for certain.
The temperature violations compound that concern. Sushi rolls held between 43 and 47 degrees Fahrenheit are above the 41-degree threshold required for time and temperature control for safety foods. Bacteria grow faster as temperature rises above that threshold, and sushi containing raw fish is among the higher-risk products a seafood market can sell.
The person in charge being unable to answer basic questions about employee health is a different kind of failure. A person in charge who cannot explain what symptoms require an employee to stay home, or what to do if a worker becomes ill during a shift, is a gap that can allow a sick employee to continue handling food. The absence of written vomit and diarrhea procedures, also cited at the same visit, leaves staff without any documented protocol if a contamination event occurs on the floor.
The Longer Record
Oumi Sushi Inspection History
Oumi Sushi has eight prior inspections on record dating to October 2023, and the pattern is mostly clean. Five of those eight visits produced zero violations, including a full sanitation inspection in February 2025 and three focused inspections across 2025.
The HACCP violation is marked as a repeat, meaning inspectors had cited the same category of noncompliance with the special process approval before the April visit. The facility passed the March 11, 2026 focused inspection with no violations, which makes the return of HACCP failures three weeks later notable.
The April inspection technically resulted in a "Met Sanitation Inspection Requirements" outcome, meaning the facility was not ordered closed. None of the six violations were corrected on site during the visit, with the exception of the sushi rolls being moved to the freezer and employee items being relocated to a designated storage area.
The expired pH buffer, the mislabeled cups, the wrong water ratio, and the incomplete verification log remained unresolved at the time the inspector left.