A new round of genetic seafood testing conducted for a state advisory panel detected foreign shrimp that was falsely presented as domestic in a small percentage of the restaurants sampled in New Orleans, despite a new state law that forbids the practice.
Sead Consulting, a Houston, Texas, company, made headlines last year when it detected mostly foreign shrimp served at the Louisiana Shrimp and Petroleum Festival in Morgan City. It announced Monday that it tested seafood at 24 randomly selected restaurants ahead of Super Bowl LIX and found three had served foreign, farm-raised shrimp while billing their catch as local.
All 24 restaurants had explicitly advertised their shrimp as either “Gulf” or “authentic” on their food menus when Sead undercover inspectors collected samples Jan. 14-19, according to company spokeswoman Glenda Beasley.
Sead launched its testing efforts last year at restaurants and festivals along the Gulf Coast as domestic shrimpers and governments try to crack down on the influx of cheap foreign catch flooding the U.S. seafood market over the past two decades.
“While New Orleans has the lowest shrimp fraud rate we’ve seen in our multi-state study so far, the deception we did uncover is particularly blatant,” Sead Consulting executive Erin Williams said in the release. “These restaurants aren’t just using suggestive imagery and wording — they are explicitly marketing their shrimp as ‘Gulf’ or ‘authentic’ while serving something else.”
It is illegal to misrepresent imported seafood as local and can result in heavy fines and, in some cases, even felony criminal charges at the federal level. On the regulatory side, the Federal Trade Commission prohibits restaurants from using misleading menu descriptions, slogans, decorations or imagery, such as nets or photos of shrimp boats on their walls, that suggest their seafood is local when they’re actually serving imported farm-raised fare.
Additionally, a Louisiana law that took effect this year ushered in heavier fines for false seafood labeling and required restaurants to clearly state the country of origin of seafood on their menus. Similar state laws have not been enforced in the past.
The Louisiana Restaurant Association, which state lawmakers have asked to help make restaurant owners aware of the new law, did not respond to requests for comment Monday made by phone and email.
Sead does not disclose the names of restaurants found to be misrepresenting their seafood. Instead, the company said it prefers to publicly list the restaurants that are operating truthfully.
In December, the Louisiana Shrimp Task Force, an advisory panel for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, asked Sead Consulting to analyze shrimp from restaurants across multiple cities in an effort to eliminate all shrimp fraud in the state.
“Customers deserve to know exactly what they’re eating, and our shrimping communities must be able to trust that restaurants using local shrimp imagery and language are genuinely selling that product,” Louisiana Shrimp Task Force member Andrew Blanchard said in a statement.
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