LAKE CITY, FL. Back in December 2025, a state food safety inspector walked into a Lake City convenience store and found chicken gizzards sitting in a hot hold box at 120 degrees Fahrenheit, 15 degrees below the minimum temperature required to keep hot food safe for customers to eat.
The inspection at Sun Stop #0314 on December 11 turned up six total violations, two of them priority-level, according to Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services records. The store met sanitation inspection requirements and was not ordered to close, but the findings paint a specific picture of what was happening inside the food processing area that day.
What Inspectors Found
The temperature violation was the most urgent finding. The inspector documented chicken gizzards in the hot hold box at 120 degrees Fahrenheit and noted they were reheated above 165 degrees during the inspection itself. That correction happened on site, but the food had already been held at an unsafe temperature before the inspector arrived.
The second priority violation involved an employee who did not wash hands before putting on gloves in the food processing area. The inspector's notes read: "Employee not washing hand before donning gloves." That violation was not marked as corrected on site.
The inspector also found an employee's sandwich and drinks sitting on the processing table, a surface used for food preparation. That was corrected during the inspection, with the food and drinks moved away from the work area.
In the retail area, the bulk milk container dispensing tube was not cut on the diagonal, a specific requirement designed to prevent contamination at the point of dispensing. The walk-in cooler floors in the back room had excessive dirt buildup under the shelves.
The store also had no written procedures for using time as a public health control in place of temperature monitoring, a priority foundation violation. That item was not corrected on site.
What These Violations Mean
The chicken gizzard temperature finding is the kind of violation that carries direct public health risk. Bacteria including Salmonella and Clostridium perfringens multiply rapidly in cooked poultry held between 70 and 125 degrees Fahrenheit. At 120 degrees, gizzards sitting in a hot hold box are inside that danger zone. State rules require hot food to stay at 135 degrees or above specifically to slow that bacterial growth. Customers who bought gizzards before the inspector arrived had no way of knowing the food had not been held at a safe temperature.
The handwashing violation compounds that risk. Gloves are not a substitute for handwashing. An employee who skips handwashing and then puts on gloves transfers whatever is on their hands to the glove surface, which then contacts food directly. In a food processing area where items like the gizzards are being prepared or handled, that is a direct contamination route.
The missing written time and temperature control procedures matter for a specific reason. When a store uses time rather than a thermometer as its safety control for certain foods, it needs a documented plan that inspectors can review. Without that plan, there is no way to verify the store is tracking how long food has been out or when it needs to be discarded. At Sun Stop #0314, that documentation did not exist at the time of the December inspection, and it was not produced before the inspector left.
The Longer Record
The December 2025 inspection was the fourth on record for this location. The history shows a facility that has cycled between clean inspections and ones with significant findings.
The most serious prior visit was in October 2022, when inspectors documented 16 violations and the store was issued a re-inspection requirement. That is the highest violation count in the location's recorded history. A September 2023 focused inspection found zero violations, suggesting the store had addressed whatever issues prompted the 2022 re-inspection. Then in October 2024, the violation count climbed again to seven, including one repeat violation.
The December 2025 inspection logged six violations with no repeats. None of the specific violations from the 2024 or 2022 inspections are identified as repeating in the current record, but the overall pattern is one of improvement followed by regression. The store has not sustained a clean record across consecutive routine inspections.
What Remained Unresolved
Two of the six violations were corrected during the December 11 inspection. The chicken gizzards were reheated above 165 degrees. The employee's personal food and drinks were removed from the processing table.
Four violations were not corrected on site. The employee who skipped handwashing before gloving, the missing written time and temperature control procedures, the improperly cut milk dispensing tube, and the dirty walk-in cooler floors were all still unresolved when the inspector completed the visit. The store met sanitation inspection requirements and was not subject to a re-inspection order, but the written procedures for time and temperature control, a priority foundation item, had not been produced by the time the inspector left the building.
