Saving Seafood

Investigating Shrimp Fraud Is an Urgent Matter on the Gulf Coast

May 1, 2025 — Imagine sitting down for a meal at a restaurant with a view of the ocean. You are on vacation, and the restaurant’s décor includes fishnets, pictures of boats and taxidermied exemplars of the local catch. You order a plate of shrimp, reasonably expecting it to have come from nearby waters.

Way too often it comes from thousands of miles away, Dave Williams told a small crowd at the Louisiana Shrimp Festival on a summer-hot day in New Orleans last fall. “And that’s despicable,” he said.

Mr. Williams is a commercial fisheries scientist who was in New Orleans to shed light on what he considers an epidemic problem: restaurants and festivals misrepresenting imported shrimp as locally caught. In many cases, diners are paying for what they think is more expensive, high-quality wild Gulf shrimp, but is actually an inferior product produced by an aquaculture industry that has a history of labor abuse. A 2020 study by Louisiana State University found two thirds of imported shrimp samples purchased in Baton Rouge contained banned veterinary drugs.

These farm-raised imports from Asia and South America have flooded the U.S. market, depressing prices. Fishing communities along the Gulf Coast have been decimated and livelihoods destroyed in part because the domestic shrimp industry is being pushed to the edge of extinction.

Mr. Williams founded a company, SEAD Consulting, that developed a genetic test to rapidly identify seafood species. He is using the technology to expose restaurants and festivals misrepresenting their seafood offerings, especially shrimp.

Read the full story at The New York Times

Josh Donlan: Mislabeling more complex than believed, needs targeted solutions

March 4, 2022 — Seafood fraud or mislabeling is a misunderstood and thinly researched problem requiring more input from seafood companies, according to academic and ecologist Josh Donlan, the founder and director of Advanced Conservation Strategies, which describes itself as providing “design-driven solutions for people and the environment.” Splitting his time between Spain and the U.S. state of Utah, Donlan is also a research fellow at the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology. SeafoodSource talked to Donlan about his research into the origins and complexities of mislabeling.

SeafoodSource: What are the key difference and similarities in the E.U. and U.S. approach to tackling mislabeling and seafood fraud?

Donlan: The U.S. government’s approach to tackling mislabeling is evolving, with the latest policy being SIMP [Seafood Import Monitoring Program] and even more recent dialogue about implementing changes to the SIMP. In general, the E.U.’s approach is more progressive, both in terms of traceability and labeling. For example, mandatory seafood labeling in the E.U. includes the scientific name, production method, the FAO fishing area where the seafood was caught, the name of the fishing vessel or aquaculture production unit, and fishing gear [used].

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

Scientists Can’t Agree On What’s Really In Subway’s Tuna Sandwiches

July 15, 2021 — July marks month number seven of the great Subway tuna sandwich debate. In January, two California women sued Subway, alleging that they tested several of the chain’s tuna sandwiches in a lab and found that the ingredients were not tuna nor fish, but a “mixture of various concoctions” mixed together to “imitate the appearance of tuna” (via the Washington Post). Subway fought back, saying that it uses only wild-caught tuna in its subs. The plaintiffs then slightly amended the lawsuit, The New York Times reported, questioning only whether or not the tuna is “100% sustainably caught skipjack and yellowfin.”

That was only phase one of the controversy. Next, news outlet Inside Edition conducted its own investigation of the sandwiches. Reporters sent samples from three tuna subs to Applied Food Technologies for DNA testing, according to a press release sent to Mashed, and received confirmation that they all contained tuna. The story doesn’t end there. Last month, The New York Times published a story detailing its own investigation, which hired an anonymous testing center to test another round of sandwiches. The results? “No amplifiable tuna DNA was present in the sample.”

Read the full story at Mashed

Subway defends tuna, top DNA lab asserts widely-publicized tests were inadequate

June 25, 2021 — Subway Restaurants has come to the defense of its tuna products and said it utilizes 100 percent wild tuna, after facing a class-action lawsuit and a New York Times report that claimed testing found no tuna DNA in the restaurant chain’s tuna sandwiches.

The DNA testing utilized by the lab in the New York Times report is not accurate for canned and/or processed tuna, according to both Subway and the founder of a top DNA testing lab for cooked and processed tuna who spoke to SeafoodSource.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

DNA lab test doesn’t detect tuna in Subway sandwiches

June 23, 2021 — After facing a class-action lawsuit claiming that Subway’s tuna sandwiches do not contain tuna and the restaurant chain cannot prove the fish is sustainable, a new DNA lab report shows there is no tuna in the company’s tuna sandwiches.

The New York Times set up an independent lab test of 60 inches of tuna sandwiches from three Subway restaurants in Los Angeles, California. The testing, which included a polymerase chain reaction test that searched for DNA of five different tuna species, detected no tuna in the sandwiches.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Subway Tuna Lawsuit Update: Plaintiffs Say Chain’s Sustainability Claims Are “False and Misleading”

June 22, 2021 — The Subway tuna lawsuit drama continues.

In January a lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California alleging that the sandwich chain’s tuna sandwich is “made with anything but tuna.” Independent lab tests that were reportedly taken from multiple California Subway locations found that the tuna was a “mixture of concoctions that do not constitute tuna, yet have been blended together by defendants to imitate the appearance of tuna.” The two plaintiffs, Karen Dhanowa and Nilima Amin of Alameda County, were hoping to get their claim certified as class action, which would open the case up to others in California who bought tuna from Subway after January 21, 2017.

Read the full story at Seafood News

NORTH CAROLINA: ‘It’s fraud’: DNA tests reveal seafood mislabeled in Triangle markets

May 27, 2021 — Fresh and local are huge selling points for seafood, but when you buy fish or shellfish from local grocery stores and markets, are you getting what you’re paying for?

“People want Carolina shrimp. It’s that simple,” said Doug Cross, co-owner of Pamlico Packing, which gets locally caught seafood to North Carolina plates.

“Our shrimp, most of them, are caught in a more brackish environment in the Pamlico Sound, which is one of the best places in the world to grow a shrimp,” Cross said.

But Cross’ competition is not just coming from other coastal fishermen. With demand for fresh and local, many sellers are cutting corners by getting their seafood from other countries. And in some cases, high-demand fish is being mislabeled.

In the past two years, two North Carolina-based crab meat companies admitted in federal court they were labeling crab as a U.S. product when a lot of the meat was foreign.

Read the full story at WRAL

Dutch firm harnesses DNA, blockchain for sturgeon traceability solution

May 21, 2021 — A Dutch firm is harnessing blockchain and DNA to disable what it has identified as a burgeoning illicit trade in wild sturgeon passed off as farmed product.

Geneusbiotech, which describes itself as a “genomics specialist company,” has introduced a traceability solution for sturgeon and caviar sold in Europe in a three-year collaboration with the Berlin Institute for Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB). The Amsterdam, the Netherlands-based company develops solutions for the food, luxury goods, and pharma sectors.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Revealed: seafood fraud happening on a vast global scale

March 15, 2021 — A Guardian Seascape analysis of 44 recent studies of more than 9,000 seafood samples from restaurants, fishmongers and supermarkets in more than 30 countries found that 36% were mislabelled, exposing seafood fraud on a vast global scale.

Many of the studies used relatively new DNA analysis techniques. In one comparison of sales of fish labelled “snapper” by fishmongers, supermarkets and restaurants in Canada, the US, the UK, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, researchers found mislabelling in about 40% of fish tested. The UK and Canada had the highest rates of mislabelling in that study, at 55%, followed by the US at 38%.

Sometimes the fish were labelled as different species in the same family. In Germany, for example, 48% of tested samples purporting to be king scallops were in fact the less coveted Japanese scallop. Of 130 shark fillets bought from Italian fish markets and fishmongers, researchers found a 45% mislabelling rate, with cheaper and unpopular species of shark standing in for those most prized by Italian consumers.

Other substitutes were of endangered or vulnerable species. In one 2018 study, nearly 70% of samples from across the UK sold as snapper were a different fish, from an astounding 38 different species, including many reef‐dwelling species that are probably threatened by habitat degradation and overfishing.

Read the full story at The Guardian