BOSTON — September 24, 2012 — Typically, frozen seafood is coated with ice to keep it fresh and minimize freezer burn. Some businesses in the supply chain add extra ice and include it in the weight declared on the label. Retailers end up charging for the water, and shoppers pay more money for less fish.
While individual shoppers are shortchanged in small increments, cumulatively, excess water in seafood is a serious issue, said Lisa Weddig of the National Fisheries Institute, a Virginia-based trade organization.
“Rather than looking at this as 30 cents here and 30 cents there, we should be looking at this as a $69 billion seafood industry and these practices could be costing the industry and consumers tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars in the end,” Weddig said.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which runs a seafood inspection program, said it finds economic fraud in at least 40 percent of products voluntarily submitted to the agency for testing by processors and other businesses. At least eight out of 10 cases involve inaccurate weights, according to Steven Wilson, chief quality officer of NOAA’s seafood inspection program.
A Globe survey of 43 seafood samples from supermarkets across Massachusetts showed about 1 in 5 glazed with ice weighed less than the net weight stated on the label, which is supposed to exclude packaging and glaze. For example, scallops sold at a Walmart store weighed roughly 13 ounces, not the 16 ounces listed. Crab meat at Kyler’s Catch in New Bedford, labeled as 6 ounces, weighed 5 ounces. The newspaper hired an independent lab to weigh the fish after removing the glaze.
The Globe then conducted a months-long examination of three local seafood suppliers. Dozens of additional samples from five supermarkets that use those suppliers were collected and sent to the lab to be weighed.
Gonsalves had the most pervasive problems: About 66 percent of the 38 Gonsalves fish samples from Market Basket and Save-A-Lot supermarkets weighed less than was stated on labels, according to results from UL-STR, the Canton lab hired by the Globe.
Read the full story at the Boston Globe