March 27, 2025 — Undercover seafood testers sampled a selection of restaurants in the Shreveport area this month and detected what they say is the highest shrimp fraud rate they have recorded to date in Louisiana.
SeaD Consulting, a food testing company that has been making headlines for uncovering seafood fraud at restaurants and festivals across the Gulf Coast, announced in a news release Wednesday that a “troubling” 58% of the restaurants sampled were deceptively serving foreign shrimp falsely presented as if it were domestic in violation of state law.
The company’s use of genetic testing found a total of 17 out of 24 restaurants sampled, or 71%, served foreign farm-raised shrimp. Fourteen of those, or 58%, did so deceptively by mislabeling the country of origin or refusing to indicate it on their menus or restaurant signage.
The sampling, taken March 8-10, is so far the highest inauthenticity rate that SeaD has recorded in Louisiana since it first launched its testing efforts last year at the Louisiana Shrimp & Petroleum Festival in Morgan City.
The company does not identify the restaurants that aren’t following the state’s labeling law, opting instead to raise awareness of its existence.
SeaD executive Erin Williams said six of the restaurants were “blatantly being deceptive” by explicitly mislabeling their dishes as “Gulf shrimp” rather than just falsely suggesting it.
It is illegal under federal and state law to mislabel imported seafood as local and can result in fines or other penalties. In some instances, seafood fraud offenses at the federal level can yield criminal charges or even prison time, such as in the 2024 convictions of two Mississippi restaurant owners, one of whom was sentenced to eight months in prison.
Local seafood was once easy to find in Louisiana, but an influx of cheap foreign catch, particularly shrimp and crawfish, has flooded the market over the past two decades.
Williams said she believes there is less public awareness in the Shreveport area of the foreign seafood problem and the plight of the coastal communities that depend on commercial fishermen.