APOPKA, FL. Back in March 2026, state agriculture inspectors walked into the Sprouts Farmers Market on a routine sanitation check and found raw shrimp sitting at 47 degrees F in the retail case, six degrees above the 41-degree threshold required to keep the product safe. It was not the first time inspectors had flagged a cold-holding problem at this location.
The inspection, conducted March 6, 2026, by the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, documented four total violations, three of them priority-level. The store met sanitation inspection requirements overall, but none of the four violations had been corrected before the inspector arrived.
What Inspectors Found
The temperature violations hit both ends of the safe food range. On the cold side, the inspector's notes read: "Retail: Raw shrimp had an internal temperature of 47 degrees F." The shrimp was moved to the walk-in cooler during the inspection to bring it back down to 41 degrees or below.
On the hot side, the inspector noted that "baked whole chickens had an internal temperature between 127-132 degrees F." Safe hot-holding requires food to stay at 135 degrees or above. The chickens had not yet crossed the point of no return, the inspector noted they still had time to be reheated to 165 degrees or placed into cooling, and staff moved them to the walk-in cooler.
In the deli area, a food employee changed tasks and put on new gloves without first washing their hands. The inspector noted the employee did not wash hands before donning the new gloves. The employee washed up and re-gloved after the inspector intervened.
In the produce section, a cart had been left blocking the handwashing sink, making it inaccessible to employees. The cart was removed during the visit.
What These Violations Mean
Temperature control is the central food safety mechanism for raw proteins. Raw shrimp held at 47 degrees F is sitting in a range where bacteria such as Vibrio and Salmonella can multiply. The longer the product stays above 41 degrees, the greater the bacterial load a shopper could be taking home, and standard cooking instructions assume the product started in a safe condition.
The hot-holding failure with the baked chickens is a different but related risk. Food that drops below 135 degrees F enters what regulators call the temperature danger zone, the range between 41 and 135 degrees where pathogens grow most rapidly. Chickens measured at 127 to 132 degrees had already slipped into that zone. The fact that staff caught them before the two-hour threshold for corrective action had passed limited the immediate risk, but the failure still represents a lapse in monitoring.
The hand hygiene violation in the deli area is direct. Changing gloves without washing hands first transfers whatever contamination is on the hands to the outside of the new gloves, which then touch the food. The gloves create a false sense of cleanliness while the contamination problem moves forward unchanged.
A blocked handwashing sink may look minor on paper, but inspectors treat it as a priority-level finding because it removes the option for employees to wash hands at all in that area. At Sprouts in Apopka, the blocked sink was in the produce section, where employees handle unwrapped product that customers buy and often eat without further cooking.
The Repeat Problem
The cold-holding temperature violation was marked repeat. That designation matters because it means inspectors had documented the same category of failure at this location before, and the store had not implemented a fix that held.
A look at the inspection record confirms it. On January 22, 2025, inspectors found nine violations, including one repeat. Six days later, on January 27, 2025, a follow-up inspection still turned up four violations, again including one repeat. The cold-holding issue documented in March 2026 connects directly to that earlier pattern.
The repeat tag is not assigned lightly. It signals that the problem was identified, documented, and communicated to the facility, and that it surfaced again on a subsequent inspection.
The Longer Record
The eight inspections on record at this Apopka location tell a split story. The five focused inspections conducted between June 2025 and March 2026 all came back with zero violations. Those visits, on August 21, October 29, January 27 follow-up, March 11, and March 17, suggest the store can and does pass scrutiny on narrower review visits.
The full sanitation inspections paint a different picture. The January 22, 2025 inspection produced nine violations. The January 27, 2025 inspection, a follow-up to that one, still found four. The March 6, 2026 inspection found four more, with one repeat.
Three of the four full sanitation inspections on record resulted in multiple violations. The zero-violation focused inspections in between do not erase that pattern; they reflect a different, more limited scope of review.
The March 6 violations were all corrected on site during the inspection visit. But the shrimp temperature failure, the same category of problem that appeared in January 2025, was still waiting to be discovered when the inspector walked in.