Saving Seafood

From Fraud to Fresh: How Shrimp Festivals Are Making Authenticity a Badge of Honor

November 4, 2025 — The following was released by SeaD Consulting:

For the second consecutive year, every vendor at the Louisiana Shrimp Festival and Shrimp Aid has been verified as serving 100% local, wild-caught Gulf shrimp, reaffirming the event’s commitment to authenticity, transparency, and support for Louisiana’s fishing communities.

Through independent testing by SeaD Consulting, using the company’s groundbreaking RIGHTTest system, each participating vendor’s shrimp passed genetic verification onsite—delivering results in under two hours. This testing program has set a new national standard for seafood festivals, ensuring attendees are served genuine Gulf shrimp from regional waters.

This marks a broader trend across the South: festivals are now holding themselves accountable to the standards they advertise. Last year, SeaD Consulting exposed vendors at the National Shrimp Festival in Gulf Shores and the Shrimp & Petroleum Festival in Morgan City for selling imported shrimp while promoting “local” seafood. Following those revelations, the National Shrimp Festival introduced a Chief Shrimp Investigator role and, with support from the Organized Seafood Association of Alabama, contracted SeaD Consulting to test every vendor. Non-compliant vendors faced fines and were barred from selling until they sourced local, wild-caught shrimp confirmed through RIGHTTest verification.

Meanwhile, rumors of imported shrimp sales at New Orleans Jazz Fest prompted a round of genetic testing this year — with only one vendor found out of compliance. Across the Gulf Coast, festivals are recognizing that consumer trust and community sustainability depend on serving what they promise.

“It’s hard to believe that we have to ensure compliance through genetic testing, but here we are,” said Dana Honn, of the Louisiana Shrimp Festival and Shrimp Aid. “The flood of imports in the U.S. has deeply impacted our shrimping communities, and we’re proud to be in our second year providing education, transparency, and support for our coastal fishers. We have to save them. I don’t want a world where we don’t have a seafaring community providing local fresh shrimp.”

The Louisiana Shrimp Festival and Shrimp Aid’s unwavering commitment to authenticity not only boosts consumer confidence but also helps preserve Louisiana’s maritime heritage. Vendors at the festival worked directly with local shrimpers to keep their supply fresh and Gulf-sourced throughout the weekend, reinforcing the event’s theme: SOS — Save Our Shrimpers.

About the Louisiana Shrimp Festival and Shrimp Aid

A Celebration of Our Shrimpers and Their Coastal Communities

The Louisiana Shrimp Festival/Shrimp Aid aims to raise awareness about the challenges faced by local shrimp and fishing industries while creating new economic opportunities for coastal communities and the broader seafood sector. Featuring award-winning musical artists, top New Orleans restaurants and pop-ups, and family-friendly programming, the festival embodies the spirit of Louisiana culture. The annual “Shrimp Aid” pavilion brings together shrimpers, chefs, and industry leaders for panels, discussions, and documentary screenings focused on sustaining local fisheries.

The Second Annual Louisiana Shrimp Festival took place October 18–19, 2025, at The Broadside in Mid-City New Orleans, with all proceeds directed toward efforts supporting shrimpers and building stronger seafood markets.

About SeaD Consulting

SeaD (Seafood Development) Consulting partners with seafood producers, researchers, agencies, and environmental organizations to advance transparency and innovation across the seafood sector. Through its RIGHTTest™ genetic verification platform, SeaD helps eliminate seafood mislabeling and substitution fraud while promoting sustainable, traceable sourcing practices.

For more information, visit www.seadconsulting.com or contact Glenda Beasley at gb@seadconsulting.com or 512.750.5199.

Disclaimer: SeaD’s testing and reporting is intended to be used as an investigatory tool to assist the restaurant industry’s fight against seafood mislabeling and is not intended for use in any legal proceedings, nor may SeaD’s data, testing, or reporting be used in any legal proceeding without the express written authorization of SeaD.

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

DNA testing of Gulf Coast restaurants’ shrimp reveals continued mislabeling

October 23, 2025 —  A follow-up investigation conducted by SeaD Consulting using its RIGHTTest™ (Rapid ID Genetic High-Accuracy Test) has revealed new insights into shrimp sourcing integrity at Gulf Coast restaurants.

The retesting, part of an ongoing regional study supported by the Southern Shrimp Alliance (SSA), found both encouraging signs of progress and persistent misrepresentation in the labeling and sourcing of shrimp served to local diners.

SeaD Consulting was previously commissioned by the SSA in March this year to conduct genetic tests on shrimp dishes from 44 restaurants in Gulf Shores, Orange Beach and Foley.

Fifty percent of restaurants from SeaD’s March’s DNA testing were randomly selected for follow-up. Of the 22 restaurants retested this month, findings show that 10 out of 22 were serving imports (46%) compared to 19 out of 44 (43%) previously tested in March 2025.

In October last year, Alabama legislators enacted the Alabama Seafood Labeling Law, which requires establishments to disclose the country of origin and whether seafood is wild-caught or farm-raised. The Alabama Department of Public Health is tasked with enforcing this law.

Read the full article at Gulf Coast Media

Southern states lay down the law on seafood labeling

June 30, 2025 — Over the course of the past year, Dave Williams, a commercial fishery scientist and founder of SeaD Consulting, has been testing shrimp in restaurants all around the Gulf states, Georgia, and the Carolinas to find out if they are selling imported farmed shrimp as Gulf shrimp. The results have been astounding, with restaurants tested in Charleston, South Carolina, showing a 90 percent fraud rate.  

Williams’s work, sponsored by the industry group Southern Shrimp Alliance, has prompted the passage of new laws and increased enforcement of existing laws aimed at protecting the U.S. domestic shrimp fleet.  

Alabama’s Seafood Labeling Law was passed in May 2024 and took effect on October 1, 2024. It requires food service establishments including restaurants, grocery store delis and seafood retailers, to list the country of origin of its fish and shellfish, or that the product was imported.

The law also requires labels to state if the seafood was farm raised or wild caught.  Suppliers must provide the seafood’s country of origin to the restaurants and delis. The law is enforced by the state Department of Public Health and consumers who believe there is a violation of the law can file a complaint via an online form.

Read the full article at National Fisherman

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