JACKSONVILLE, FL. A food employee at Wendy's #65 on Southside Boulevard was working without following parasite destruction procedures on October 6, meaning fish served to customers may not have been subjected to the freezing or cooking protocols required to kill Anisakis, tapeworm, and other parasites that survive in raw or lightly handled seafood.
That was one of six high-severity violations inspectors documented at the location that day. The restaurant was not closed.
What Inspectors Found
The inspection on October 6 found no person in charge present or performing duties. State inspection data consistently links absent managerial control to higher rates of critical violations, and this location bore that out: every other high-severity finding on the list represents a failure that an engaged manager on the floor is expected to catch and correct.
Inspectors also found that food employees were not reporting symptoms of illness. That violation sits alongside inadequate handwashing as a direct route for pathogens to move from a sick worker to a customer's food.
The shell stock identification failure adds a separate layer of risk. Inspectors cited inadequate records for shellfish, meaning that if a customer became ill after eating oysters, clams, or mussels from this location, there would be no reliable paper trail to trace the source.
Inspectors also cited the improper use of time as a public health control. When a facility uses time instead of temperature to manage food safety, it is operating under a specific protocol that requires precise tracking. At this location, that protocol was not being followed properly.
The intermediate violation, improper sewage or waste water disposal, was the seventh item on the list.
What These Violations Mean
The parasite destruction failure is the kind of violation that rarely registers with customers because the consequences are not immediate. Parasites in fish do not cause symptoms the way a fast-moving bacterial illness does. Anisakis larvae, for example, can cause severe abdominal pain, nausea, and vomiting hours or days after consumption, and the connection to a specific meal is often never made.
The illness-reporting and handwashing violations are more acutely dangerous in combination. A food worker who is symptomatic with norovirus and does not report it, and who also does not wash hands adequately, is a direct transmission route to every item they touch. Norovirus requires an extremely low dose to cause infection, and it survives on surfaces.
The time-as-public-health-control violation means food was permitted to sit in the bacterial growth zone, between 41 and 135 degrees, without the strict time documentation that substitutes for temperature monitoring. Without that documentation, there is no way to know how long food spent in that range.
The sewage disposal violation introduces fecal contamination risk throughout the facility. Improperly handled wastewater carries pathogens including E. coli, hepatitis A, and norovirus. Its presence alongside the handwashing failure compounds that risk significantly.
The Longer Record
Wendy's #65 Southside Blvd, Inspection History
This location has 25 inspections on record and 121 total violations. October 6 was not an anomaly.
The most direct comparison is April 18, 2024, when inspectors also logged six high-severity violations and one intermediate, the identical severity profile as the October 2026 inspection. Between those two dates, the location had a stretch of cleaner inspections, but the pattern of returning to high violation counts is documented across multiple years.
The January 2025 inspection found three high-severity violations. The March 2025 inspection found two. The location has never been emergency-closed in its inspection history.
A two-day follow-up inspection on October 8 found zero high-severity violations and zero intermediate violations, which inspectors recorded as meeting state standards.
The restaurant served customers through all of it.
