PALM BAY, FL. Back in April 2026, a state inspector walked into Sunbay Market on Ocean Breeze Street and found the convenience store open and selling food without a valid food permit. That finding alone triggered a mandatory re-inspection requirement. What came with it made the situation considerably worse.
The April 3 inspection by the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services turned up 14 violations, four of them priority-level, the category the state reserves for conditions most directly linked to foodborne illness. Not one violation was corrected on site during the inspection itself.
What Inspectors Found
The reach-in display cooler was the source of the most serious problems. The inspector measured its internal temperature at 47 to 50 degrees Fahrenheit, well above the 41-degree maximum the state requires for cold-held foods. Soups, fish and Jamaican patties inside that cooler were measured at the same range.
Raw shell eggs that had been delivered to the store a week earlier were also sitting in that cooler at 47 degrees. The inspector noted the eggs had never reached safe ambient temperature. Two stop sale orders were issued, both citing adulteration due to improper cold-holding temperatures.
Containers of raw shell eggs were also stored directly over ready-to-eat bread in the same cooler. The inspector noted the eggs were voluntarily discarded because they had not been kept at ambient temperature. Cross-contamination from raw animal products to ready-to-eat food is among the most direct pathways to a foodborne illness outbreak.
The chemical storage problem added another layer. Containers of hydrogen peroxide and floor cleaner were stored over single-use utensils in the retail area. The manager moved the chemicals to a new location during the inspection, one of the few corrective actions taken that day.
Packages of rice, bread, cookies and fish that had been packaged on site carried no proper labeling. No common name, no ingredient list, no identifying information of any kind.
The coffee station hand-wash sink had no soap and no paper towels. No hand-wash reminder signs were posted at that sink or in the unisex restroom. The store had no written procedures for cleaning up vomit or diarrhea, no documentation showing employees had been informed about their obligation to report foodborne illness symptoms, and a person in charge who could not answer basic questions about employee health policy.
What These Violations Mean
The cooler failure is the violation with the most immediate consequence for anyone who bought food at Sunbay Market before the inspection. Soups, fish, Jamaican patties and raw eggs held between 47 and 50 degrees sit in a temperature range where bacteria including Salmonella and Listeria multiply rapidly. The eggs had been in that condition for approximately a week before the inspector arrived.
The cross-contamination finding, raw shell eggs stored above ready-to-eat bread, matters because it requires only one moment of contact or drip to transfer Salmonella directly to food a customer will eat without cooking. The inspector's decision to order the eggs discarded rather than simply moved reflects how seriously that combination was treated.
The unlabeled packaged goods, rice, bread, cookies and fish, create a traceability problem. If a customer became ill after buying one of those packages, there would be no lot number, no production date, no supplier information to trace. The label requirement exists precisely for that scenario.
Operating without a valid food permit means the store had no current authorization from the state to sell food at all. That status also means the state had reduced visibility into the facility's compliance history during whatever period the permit had lapsed.
The Longer Record
The inspection data does not include a prior inspection count for Sunbay Market, which means this April 2026 visit may represent one of the facility's earliest documented encounters with FDACS inspectors. None of the 14 violations were marked as repeat citations, which the state uses to flag problems that persisted from a previous inspection.
The absence of repeat flags does not mean the problems were new. A cooler running 6 to 9 degrees above the legal limit, eggs delivered a week earlier and never properly cold-held, and a hand-wash sink with no soap or towels are not conditions that develop in a single day.
The re-inspection requirement attached to this visit means the state was not finished with Sunbay Market on April 3. The store's permit status, the cooler temperature, the employee health documentation and the labeling failures were all unresolved when the inspector left.
What Remained Unresolved
Of the 14 violations documented on April 3, none were recorded as corrected on site. The manager moved the cleaning chemicals away from the utensils, and the eggs were discarded, but the underlying equipment failure, a reach-in cooler that could not hold food below 41 degrees, was still in place when the inspector closed out the visit.
A cooler measuring 47 to 50 degrees internally, with a stop-use order issued against it for unsanitary equipment, remained the central unresolved fact of the inspection.