Saving Seafood

Meet the scientist exposing shrimp fraud across the South. ‘I’m a little bit of an evangelist.’

October 24, 2025 — Dave Williams has been to hundreds of seafood restaurants across the South over the past year, and he isn’t hunting for the best shrimp po-boy or crawfish étouffée.

From Texas to North Carolina — and at more than 200 restaurants and three festivals in Louisiana — the commercial fisheries scientist and his team have collected minuscule shrimp samples for a rapid genetic test. The goal is to determine whether the restaurant is serving local shrimp or foreign imports. It’s all part of Williams’ mission to help revitalize the Gulf of Mexico’s ailing coastal industry.

Williams, who does this work through his company SeaD Consulting, presented his findings to Louisiana shrimpers and seafood enthusiasts at the Louisiana Shrimp Festival and Shrimp Aid at the Broadside in Mid-City earlier this month. Attendees sampled dishes like shrimp birria tacos and tempura-fried shrimp, while listening to live music and even watching a puppet show.

Read the full article at NOLA

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