WEST MELBOURNE, FL. Back in December 2025, state inspectors walked into Wawa #5318 on a routine food safety check and found that the person in charge could not answer basic questions about employee health, and the store had no written procedures for handling a vomit or diarrhea incident on the premises.
The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services conducted the inspection on December 11, 2025. The store met sanitation requirements overall, but inspectors recorded three violations, including two priority foundation citations that point to gaps in how the store manages food safety at a fundamental level.
What Inspectors Found
UNRESOLVED AT CLOSE
CORRECTED ON SITE
The most direct citation involved the store's manager. According to the inspector's notes, the person in charge was "unable to answer questions on employee health." Industry documents were provided during the visit, but the citation itself was not corrected on site.
The second priority foundation violation was closely related. The inspector noted that the establishment "did not have any written procedures for cleanup of vomit and diarrhea." Documentation was provided to the store during the inspection, but again, the violation was not resolved before the inspector left.
The third violation was minor by comparison. Utensils stored in a basket above the three-compartment sink in the back kitchen were not inverted, leaving their food-contact surfaces exposed. The manager corrected that one immediately.
What These Violations Mean
The two priority foundation violations at this Wawa location are not about a single bad day in the kitchen. They point to structural gaps in how the store trains and prepares its staff for food safety emergencies.
When a person in charge cannot answer questions about employee health, it raises a direct concern: if a worker comes in sick, who decides whether that employee should be handling food or packaged goods? State food safety rules require that someone in a supervisory role understand the symptoms and illnesses that require an employee to be restricted or excluded from food handling duties. Norovirus, Salmonella, Shigella, and Hepatitis A are among the conditions that can spread from a sick food worker to customers. Without a knowledgeable person in charge, that screening breaks down entirely.
The missing vomit and diarrhea cleanup procedures are connected to the same risk. Norovirus, one of the most contagious foodborne illnesses in the United States, spreads rapidly through contaminated surfaces and can survive on them for days. A written cleanup protocol specifies what disinfectants to use, how to contain the area, and how to protect other employees and customers during cleanup. Without that plan in writing, staff are left to improvise during an incident that requires a precise response.
Neither of those violations was corrected before the inspector left the store. The inspector provided relevant documentation during the visit, but documentation handed over at the end of an inspection is not the same as a trained staff and a posted protocol.
The Longer Record
The December 2025 inspection was only the second FDACS inspection on record for this Wawa location. The first, a focused inspection conducted on May 31, 2024, found zero violations.
That clean prior record makes the December findings harder to dismiss as a fluke. A store that passed a focused inspection in 2024 with no issues had, by December 2025, accumulated a manager who could not speak to employee health requirements and no written emergency cleanup plan in place. Neither of those gaps develops overnight.
The store has a short inspection history, so there is no pattern of repeat violations to document. What the record does show is that the two most significant findings from December were not corrected on site, meaning the store left that inspection day without a trained person in charge on employee health protocols and without a posted cleanup procedure for one of the most common and contagious illness scenarios in a retail food environment.
Where Things Stood After the Inspection
The store met sanitation requirements overall, which means it was not cited for conditions serious enough to trigger a closure or stop sale order. No products were pulled. No emergency action was taken.
But two of the three violations recorded that day remained unresolved when the inspector walked out. The person in charge at Wawa #5318 still could not answer employee health questions. The store still had no written plan for what to do if someone became ill on the premises.
Those are the facts the December 11 inspection left behind.
