PORT ST LUCIE, FL. A state inspector visiting Paleteria Calderon 2 on SE Port St. Lucie Boulevard on April 24 found food sourced from unapproved or unknown suppliers, a violation that means anything sold at the counter that day could not be traced back through any federally regulated safety inspection if a customer became ill.
The shop remained open after the visit.
What Inspectors Found
The April inspection produced seven high-severity violations and zero intermediate ones. Every single citation issued that day carried the state's highest risk designation.
Among the seven: food contact surfaces not properly cleaned or sanitized, food not cooked to the required minimum temperature, and time as a public health control not properly used. Inspectors also found no employee health policy in place and inadequate handwashing facilities.
No intermediate violations were cited. The inspection record shows only high-priority failures, with no lower-level concerns noted alongside them.
What These Violations Mean
The unapproved food source citation is the one that cuts deepest for anyone who bought a paleta or drink at this shop before the inspection. When food bypasses USDA or FDA-regulated supply chains, there is no paper trail. If a customer gets sick, investigators have nowhere to start. Listeria and Salmonella contamination in unregulated food products have caused multistate outbreaks precisely because the source could not be quickly identified.
The inadequate handwashing facilities violation compounds that risk. Handwashing is not a courtesy in a food service environment, it is the primary physical barrier between a worker's pathogens and a customer's food. Without functioning handwashing infrastructure, that barrier does not exist.
The allergen citation is its own category of danger. Food allergies affect 32 million Americans, and reactions to undisclosed allergens send roughly 30,000 people to emergency rooms each year. A shop that cannot demonstrate basic allergen awareness is a shop where a customer with a tree nut or dairy allergy cannot make an informed decision about what they are eating. At a paleteria, where ingredients vary by flavor and batch, that gap is not theoretical.
The temperature and time violations describe a separate but related failure. When food is not cooked to minimum required temperatures, pathogens like Salmonella survive. When time controls are misapplied, food sits in the bacterial growth range, between 41 and 135 degrees Fahrenheit, longer than state rules allow. Both violations create conditions for illness that a customer would have no way of detecting.
The Longer Record
Paleteria Calderon 2: Inspection History
State records show 15 inspections on file for this location, with 45 total violations documented across that history. The shop has never been emergency-closed.
High-severity violations have appeared in six of the eight most recent inspections with available data. The pattern is consistent: two high-priority citations in October 2024, two in June 2024, two in December 2023, two in March 2023, two in June 2022. The April 2026 inspection did not introduce a new problem so much as it multiplied one that has been present for years.
The two clean inspections on record, in March and February 2024, sit inside that longer string of high-priority citations. They are the exception, not the trend.
What changed in April 2026 was the scale. Two high-severity violations per visit had been the baseline. Seven in a single inspection, covering food sourcing, handwashing infrastructure, allergen training, cooking temperatures, surface sanitation, and time controls, represents a failure across nearly every critical category a food service operation is expected to maintain.
Still Open
Florida law gives inspectors the authority to order an emergency closure when conditions pose an immediate threat to public health. Seven high-severity violations, including food from an unapproved source and no functioning handwashing setup, did not meet that threshold on April 24.
Paleteria Calderon 2 was still serving customers when the inspector left.