ORLANDO, FL. Back in February 2026, a state inspector walked into the deli at Publix #1625 and probed a cooked pork roast with a calibrated thermometer. The reading came back at 124 degrees Fahrenheit, eleven degrees below the 135-degree minimum required for safely held hot food.
The pork had been held less than four hours, according to inspection records. It was voluntarily discarded.
That finding was one of three priority violations the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services documented during the February 6 inspection. The store met sanitation inspection requirements overall, but the deli generated every violation on the report.
What Inspectors Found
The cold-side problem mirrored the hot-side one. A sliced roast beef portion in the deli measured 48 degrees Fahrenheit, nearly seven degrees above the 41-degree maximum for cold-held food. The inspector's record states the items were placed in the cooler for rapid chill.
The third priority violation involved a deli employee who touched their face and then handled clean equipment without washing hands in between. The inspector noted the employee washed hands and the touched equipment was sent to the ware wash area before the inspection continued.
A fourth violation, rated priority foundation rather than priority, came from the seafood department. Shell stock tags, which are required to stay attached to the original container until the last date the product is sold, were missing that date. The inspector's notes do not indicate this was corrected on site.
None of the four violations were marked as repeats from prior inspections.
What These Violations Mean
Temperature violations in a deli counter are not paperwork problems. When cooked meat drops below 135 degrees Fahrenheit during hot holding, it enters a range where bacteria that survived cooking can begin to multiply again. The longer food sits in that range, the greater the risk. At Publix #1625, the pork roast had been held less than four hours before the inspector arrived, which is why it was discarded rather than reheated. The threshold for automatic discard is four hours in the temperature danger zone.
The cold-side failure carries the same logic in reverse. Sliced roast beef at 48 degrees is inside the temperature range where pathogens like Listeria, Salmonella, and Staphylococcus aureus thrive. Deli meats are a particular concern because they are typically eaten without further cooking. A customer buying sliced roast beef from a case running seven degrees too warm has no second line of defense.
The hand hygiene violation is more direct. When a food handler touches their face and then touches equipment that contacts food, the transmission route from person to product is immediate. The corrective steps the inspector noted, handwashing and equipment sent to the dish area, address the specific incident. They do not address whether the behavior was routine before the inspector arrived.
The shellstock tag requirement exists for one reason: traceability. If a customer becomes ill after eating oysters or clams, public health investigators need to know where those shellfish came from, which harvest waters, which dealer, which date. A tag missing the last date sold breaks that chain. The seafood department at this Publix left that gap unresolved when the inspector left.
The Longer Record
The February 2026 inspection was the fifth FDACS inspection on record at this location. The prior four produced a combined total of three violations, all from a single July 2023 visit. The two inspections in 2024 and the focused inspection in October 2025 each came back clean.
That history makes the February findings stand out rather than fit a pattern. This is not a store accumulating the same citations year after year. The temperature and hand hygiene violations documented in February represent a departure from what had been a consistently clean recent record.
None of the violations recorded in July 2023 are described in the data, so a direct comparison to the February 2026 findings is not possible. What the record does show is that the store went roughly two and a half years between any violations at all, then produced three priority citations in a single deli inspection.
What Remained Unresolved
Three of the four violations were addressed before the inspector left. The pork was discarded, the beef was moved for rapid chilling, and the employee washed hands. The store met sanitation inspection requirements.
The shellstock tag violation in the seafood department carried no correction noted in the record. Tags in the seafood case at this Publix were still missing the last date sold when the inspection closed.