FDA found flies on La Pradera's ready-to-eat cheese at its third failed inspection

On August 28, 2026, the FDA sent a warning letter to Tipical Latin Food, Corp., doing business as La Pradera, a Doral, Florida plant making ready-to-eat Venezuelan-style cheeses — queso de mano, queso guayanes, queso estilo telita — plus cachapa corn pancakes. The agency ruled the products adulterated: prepared under insanitary conditions where they could have picked up filth or become injurious to health.

What the April 2026 inspection found reads like a checklist of failure. Several live flies were observed inside the processing room landing on food-contact surfaces and on the ready-to-eat cheese itself. Around seven small live cockroaches were counted crawling on the tray holding clean mold rings, on the molding machine, on the box of cheese curds, and on the floor. The door to the processing area stood open to the outside.

The deeper problem was systemic: the plant had no food safety plan at all — no hazard analysis, no preventive controls, no supply-chain program, no recall plan, and no temperature monitoring of the walk-in cooler where the soft cheeses sat overnight. Employees put on gloves without washing, touched soiled cart handles and their faces, then handled the cheese; molds cleaned and sanitized still showed white residue; molding-machine screws claimed as cleaned carried cheese residue on their blades.

None of this was new. The identical missing food safety plan was a repeat observation from inspections in December 2024 and May 2025, as were the pests and the damaged equipment. FDA gave the firm fifteen working days to respond or face seizure, injunction, or suspension of its food facility registration — and noted its letter was only 'not an all-inclusive list'.

Its ready-to-eat queso de mano, queso guayanes and telita were ruled adulterated; FDA warned of seizure, injunction or suspension of the facility's registration.

The plant failed three FDA inspections in about 16 months without building the one document — a food safety plan — the rule requires.

Live flies landed directly on ready-to-eat cheese that ships with no kill step, the exact pathway for listeria and other pathogens.

Even the cleanup was failing: molds and 'sanitized' machine screws still carried residue when the inspector looked.

A warning letter is a rehearsal: a food plant that treats an inspection as a one-off surprise will meet the same inspector again, holding the same list.

FDA set a fifteen-working-day deadline for corrective steps and warned that failure could bring seizure, injunction, or suspension of the facility's registration. The source records no response from the company.