SEMINOLE, FL. Back in January 2026, a state inspector visiting Sushi With Gusto, a seafood market retail shop in Seminole, found freshly made sushi rolls sitting in a retail cooler at temperatures well above the safe limit, including a California Roll with an internal temperature of 54 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services conducted the inspection on January 14, 2026. The shop met sanitation inspection requirements overall, but the visit turned up three violations, one of them a priority concern.
What Inspectors Found
The inspector's notes are specific. In the retail area, various sushi rolls made onsite were placed in a retail cooler for customer self-service before the sushi had reached 41 degrees or below. The inspector recorded a Tempura Shrimp Roll at 47 degrees, a Crunchy California Roll at 46 degrees, and a California Roll at 54 degrees.
The person in charge told the inspector the rolls had been cooling in the walk-in cooler for two hours before being pulled and placed in the retail case. After the inspector flagged the temperatures, the person in charge moved the product back to the walk-in cooler to finish cooling within the required parameters.
That corrective step happened during the visit. But the violation was not marked as corrected on site in the final record.
Knowledge Gaps and a Paper Trail With Holes
Beyond the temperature finding, the inspector documented two additional violations tied to food safety management, both classified as Priority Foundation issues.
The person in charge could not answer questions about employee restriction or exclusion, or explain how the shop was supposed to comply with illness reporting responsibilities. That is a basic knowledge requirement for anyone running a retail food operation.
The third violation involved the shop's HACCP plan, the written food safety system that governs how Sushi With Gusto handles its seafood and prepared sushi products. The plan stated that logs would be verified monthly, and every log page included a signature line for that verification. When the inspector reviewed the HACCP notebook for December 2025, some pages had no review at all, while others showed a date of January 6, 2026.
The December logs, in other words, were not consistently signed off during December.
What These Violations Mean
The temperature violation is the most immediately consequential finding from this inspection. Sushi rolls contain ingredients that require strict cold-chain management, including raw or cooked seafood, rice, and proteins like shrimp. State rules require these items to be held at 41 degrees or below because bacterial growth accelerates sharply between 41 and 135 degrees.
A California Roll sitting at 54 degrees in a self-service retail cooler is a direct exposure risk for any customer who picks it up. The customer has no way of knowing the roll was not properly chilled before it reached the shelf.
The person-in-charge knowledge gap compounds the temperature problem. When the individual responsible for the operation cannot explain how to handle a sick employee or what reporting obligations apply, that is not a paperwork failure. It means the shop's first line of defense against an illness outbreak is absent. A sick food handler who is not recognized and excluded from work is one of the most direct transmission routes for foodborne illness in a retail setting.
The HACCP log gaps matter for a different reason. A HACCP plan only works if it is actually followed and documented. Sushi With Gusto operates under a special process approval that requires this kind of oversight, and the December records show that oversight was inconsistent. If a product safety issue emerged and investigators needed to trace it, incomplete logs make that reconstruction harder.
The Longer Record
Sushi With Gusto has a short inspection history. The two prior FDACS inspections on record both took place on September 5, 2024, and both were preoperational inspections that resulted in zero violations.
That means this January 2026 visit was effectively the shop's first routine sanitation inspection since opening. There is no pattern of repeat violations to examine because there is no prior sanitation record to compare against.
What the history does show is that the shop opened clean and passed its preoperational reviews without issue. The violations documented in January were not repeats, and none of the three had been cited before.
None of the three violations were formally marked as corrected on site. The person in charge did move the under-temperature sushi rolls back to the walk-in cooler during the inspection, and the inspector noted that step. But the HACCP log gaps and the person-in-charge knowledge deficiencies remained unresolved when the inspector left on January 14.