Was your Sedano’s the one with ‘soft and rotten’ potatoes and mold on other food?
Food with mold and food that needed more cold caused a Sedano’s Supermarket to get a “Re-Inspection Required” grade Tuesday from a Florida Department of Agriculture inspector.
This Sedano’s at 6430 NW 186th St. isn’t in Hialeah (about five miles south) or Miami Gardens (about two miles east), no matter what Google tells you. It’s in unincorporated Northwest Miami-Dade, across the street from the Country Club Plaza strip mall and serves mostly the Country Club of Miami and Palm Springs North areas.
Inspector Simeon Carrero didn’t have to put a Stop Use Order on any areas and actually didn’t find many violations at this Sedano’s.
But he found enough. These aren’t all the violations, just the ones that might make you go “ew” if you read the inspection. Some of these were corrected at the time of inspection, which, for food, means it became “basura.”
▪ In retail area produce holding boxes, Carrero saw “soft and rotten” potatoes and “malanga roots with mold.” Management trashed the potatoes and the malanga roots.
▪ In the produce area, a cutting board so “scratched and pitted that it can no longer be effectively cleaned and sanitized” — a violation in a store that has new cutting boards for sale on the retail shelves.
▪ In the meat department, “observed a large grinder and a ban saw in use for more than four hours” without being cleaned. So, specks of old meat get mixed with new meat, which might be the same kind of meat, when the new meat is ground or cut.
▪ Back to the produce area, food should be cooled to 41 degrees or below. Inspector Carrero found “several cut melons” measuring 54 to 56 degrees after four hours of cooling. Other cut melons and bean sprouts measured 45 to 56 degrees in an apparently ineffective cold holding unit. All got tossed.
▪ Safe keeping for food in the cafe area’s hot holding case means having an internal temperature of 135 degrees. Coming in at only 124 degrees to 128 degrees in the hot holding case were ham and cheese empanadas; beef empanadas, spinach empanadas, chicken empanadas, ham croquettes, chicken croquettes and stuffed beef yuca.
Trashed.
Unlike Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation inspections of restaurants, failing doesn’t mean a store gets closed until it passes. But parts of the store can be put under a Stop Use order until the problem gets properly addressed. Obviously, if a place gets enough Stop Use orders, it might not have enough parts it can use to make opening worthwhile.
What follows comes from Florida Department of Agriculture inspection of supermarkets and food distributors in Miami-Dade. If you want a place inspected or want to report a problem, don’t email us. Go to the Department of Agriculture website and file a complaint.
We don’t decide who gets inspected or how strictly they get inspected. We report without passion or prejudice, but with humor on BOGO.
This story was originally published April 7, 2022 at 7:42 AM.
