County pulls plug on free coffee, doughnuts at Camarillo store

Ty Brann likes the neighborly feel of his local hardware store. The fourth-generation Ventura County resident and small business owner has been going to the B & B Do it Center on Mobile Avenue in Camarillo for many years. His company, Kastle Kare, does pest control, landscaping and plant care, and he’s a B & B regular.

So when he learned the county had told B & B it could no longer put out its usual box of doughnuts and coffee pot for the morning customers, Brann was taken aback. Poll Should coffee and doughnuts be considered food service? Yes No Not if it was made at a permitted location, like a doughnut shop.

“I was a little outraged, to be honest,” said Brann, 45. “They were putting this stuff out there out of the kindness of their hearts. They called it their little pink box of love. I thought it had to be a joke.”

An anonymous customer complaint to the county brought health inspectors to the store, who determined its tradition of more than 15 years of offering coffee and doughnuts to customers violated food-handling regulations.

“We’ve been doing this since we bought the place 15 years ago and the previous owner was doing it, too,” said Randy Collins, 42, co-owner with his parents of B & B. “We simply weren’t aware we were causing a problem.”

Inspectors told Collins that unless he was willing to install stainless-steel sinks with hot and cold water and have a prep kitchen to handle the food, he was violating the law.

“The state health and safety code talks about food regulations,” said Elizabeth Huff, manager of community services for the Ventura County Environmental Health Division. “Anybody who handles food is subject to the regulations.”

At issue is the level of permit required for a retail establishment to offer food to the public. “What some establishments do is hire a mobile food preparation services or in some cases a coffee service,” said Huff. “Those establishments have permits and can operate in front of or even inside of the stores. But where the public has access to food, permitting is required.”

Huff indicated there are several levels of permits, depending on the store’s needs. All carry various costs.

“We’re certainly working with the health department,” said Collins. “We want to be in compliance with the law.”

“This is a small town,” said Brann. “I don’t think they did anything wrong, I mean, just coffee? Come on. This seems a little overboard and heavy-handed to me.”

“It’s the money, not the sanitation,” Thomas Frye, 75, of Camarillo said of the county’s motivation. “We’ve abandoned common sense where the need for licenses and fees are more important than tradition.”

Grace Pugliese, 70, of Camarillo said customers should be allowed to make up their own minds on a doughnut. “I understand where they’re coming from,” she said, “but we are losing that small-town feel.”

County officials clarify store doughnut ban

By Tony Biasotti, Ventura County Star

March 2, 2010

County officials Tuesday defended their recent order to a Camarillo hardware store to stop giving away coffee and doughnuts, saying they were more concerned about the store’s practice of cooking and serving barbecued meat.

County Supervisor Kathy Long, whose district includes the Camarillo location of the B&B Do It Center, asked Environmental Health Director Bob Gallagher to discuss the issue at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting.

Both Gallagher and supervisors said they thought the matter was blown out of proportion in a Ventura County Star story last week that mentioned the coffee and doughnuts but not the unpermitted barbecue.

“In this specific instance, we got a complaint that a hardware store was barbecuing meat,” Gallagher said. “That’s something we would normally respond to, and we did. The business was cooperative — we asked them to stop that and they did.”

The store was also selling some food items and giving out coffee and doughnuts without a proper permit, and the owners agreed to stop doing that as well, Gallagher said.

“When we visited, we found that they also put out coffee and doughnuts as something for their customers,” he said. “Normally we wouldn’t be involved in a business if that’s all they were doing, but because we were in there dealing with the other food operation, they came under our oversight.”

Gallagher said county food-safety inspectors are told to concentrate on people and businesses that handle “high-risk food.”

“Normally, a hardware store or other business that’s putting out comparatively low-risk items like coffee, or lollipops for kids, we’re not regulating that,” he said.

Long said environmental health workers have been unfairly criticized since the matter came to light, as bloggers and news organizations across the country have picked up the story.

“The inspection was in response to a legitimate complaint, and the hardware store was very complimentary in response to the inspector on how it was handled,” Long said. “That should have been the end of the story, and it really spun out of control.”

John Moore, metro editor of The Star, said an Environmental Health Division official was interviewed for more than 15 minutes by a reporter for last week’s story and never mentioned the violation was for unpermitted barbecue. “Had she said that, we certainly would have included the information in our original story,” Moore said.

The family-run hardware store has been serving customers free coffee for 20 years and doughnuts for the past six or seven years, owner Randy Collins said Tuesday.

Collins said employees were only promoting the store’s new barbecue smoker by cooking the meat in front for a few hours on Saturdays.

“We were only doing it a month or two,” Collins said. “Customers would ask for samples, and frankly the employees just did not realize they were doing anything wrong. That caused the complaint, and we stopped it as soon as the Health Department came in.”

When Collins was told the doughnuts and coffee also had to go unless he made various changes to his store — including putting in a new three-compartment sink, a refrigerator and approved flooring — he decided to stop the free caffeine and sweet treats, he said.

Collins said he also was told to stop selling candy.

“This is so common in so many small businesses, like salons, car dealerships, barber shops, even the dentist,” Collins said. “It’s so common in the small business world, but do these businesses know it is illegal? I’m not angry ... I’m just disappointed. It’s still nice to serve your customers something.”

— Staff writer Marjorie Hernandez contributed to this report.

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