LIVE OAK, FL. Back in December 2025, state agriculture inspectors walked into Smoke Cave, a hemp specialty shop in Live Oak, and left with 39 stop sale orders covering hemp extract and kratom products sold to the public without a valid food permit.
The December 9 inspection by the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services turned up 10 violations in total. The stop sale orders targeted products across multiple failure categories: labeling deficiencies, child-resistant container requirements, approved source documentation, and marketing restrictions. The shop was operating that day without an annual food permit, a baseline legal requirement for any establishment selling consumable products regulated under Florida food law.
What Inspectors Found on the Shelves
The hemp extract violations were extensive. Inspectors found hemp products sold in containers that did not comply with ASTM International D3475-20, the federal standard for child-resistant packaging. Stop sale orders were issued on those products immediately.
Other hemp extract products on the shelves were missing required labeling elements: no scannable barcode or QR code linked to a certificate of analysis from an independent testing laboratory, no batch number, no website address for batch information, no expiration date, and no milligram count per serving for each marketed cannabinoid. The inspector issued stop sale orders on those products as well.
Hemp products designed solely for inhalation were not labeled with the required statement, "Not Intended For Ingestion, Do Not Eat." Stop sale orders were issued there too.
Some hemp products were found to contain color additives, which Florida law prohibits in hemp extract intended for human consumption because such additives make the products attractive to children. Those products were also pulled.
On the kratom side, inspectors noted that "various kratom products were improperly labeled as provided in emergency rule 5KER25-4." Specifically, kratom products must display the concentration of 7-Hydroxymitragynine, a potent alkaloid, expressed in parts per million on a dry-weight basis. The products on the shelf did not carry that information. This was a repeat violation, meaning inspectors had cited the shop for the same kratom labeling failure on a prior visit.
The shop also lacked the required age-verification sign for kratom sales, which state law requires to be posted directly adjacent to the product display and must read: "THE SALE OF KRATOM TO PERSONS UNDER THE AGE OF 21 IS PROHIBITED, PROOF OF AGE IS REQUIRED FOR PURCHASE." That sign was not present when the inspector arrived. The same sign was missing for hemp extract products. Both signs were provided and posted before the inspector left.
What These Violations Mean
The child-resistant packaging requirement is not a paperwork formality. Hemp extract products, particularly those containing concentrated cannabinoids, can cause serious harm to young children who access them. The ASTM D3475-20 standard exists specifically to ensure that containers require a level of dexterity and strength that most children under five cannot manage. Products sold at Smoke Cave in packaging that did not meet that standard were accessible to any child who might pick them up.
The labeling failures carry a different but equally serious risk. When a hemp product lacks a QR code linked to a certificate of analysis from an independent lab, there is no way for a consumer, or a poison control center, to verify what is actually in the product, at what concentration, or whether it was tested for contaminants. The batch number and expiration date requirements exist for the same reason: traceability. If someone is harmed by a product, investigators need to be able to trace it back to a specific production run.
The kratom labeling violation is particularly significant because 7-Hydroxymitragynine, the compound that must be disclosed in parts per million, is a highly potent opioid-receptor agonist. It is far more potent by weight than mitragynine, the more commonly known kratom alkaloid, and its concentration varies dramatically between products. Consumers cannot make informed decisions about dosage without that information on the label. The fact that this was a repeat violation at Smoke Cave means the shop had been put on notice about this specific requirement before December and had not corrected it.
Operating without a valid food permit means the shop was not authorized to sell consumable products at all on the day of the inspection. Any sale made without that permit is a violation of Florida food law independent of the product-specific citations.
The Longer Record
The inspection data does not include a prior inspection count for Smoke Cave, so the full scope of the facility's history with state regulators is not available in these records. What the December 9 inspection does confirm is that at least one violation, the kratom 7-Hydroxymitragynine labeling requirement, was not new. It was marked as a repeat, which means inspectors had cited the shop for the same failure in a previous visit and found it uncorrected when they returned.
The repeat status on the kratom labeling violation is notable because the emergency rule requiring that disclosure, 5KER25-4, was issued specifically to address public safety concerns about kratom potency transparency. A shop that had already been cited under that rule and continued selling non-compliant products was still stocking them when inspectors arrived in December.
None of the 10 violations documented on December 9 were corrected on site, with the exception of the two age-verification signs for kratom and hemp products, which were posted before the inspector completed the visit. The stop sale orders on the products themselves, covering child-unsafe containers, missing labeling, unapproved sourcing, and prohibited color additives, remained in effect at the conclusion of the inspection.
