Saving Seafood

The fish you’re eating in London might not be what it’s labelled

April 16, 2019 — When biology professor Jennifer McDonald got the DNA results back from her students’ experiment on fish, a high number of the fish were not what was said on the label.

As part of a class experiment at Fanshawe College, her students were sent to grocery stores and sushi restaurants in London to collect fish samples.

The class extracted the DNA and compared how many samples were actually what they claimed to be.

Of the 16 samples, they were able to sequence nine of them due to varied success rates.

Seven of the nine were misidentified, McDonald said.

“Yeah, it was a pretty high number,” she said.

A piece of fish that was labelled as red snapper came back as tilapia, something McDonald said happens all the time.

“That really wasn’t surprising. It was disappointing but not surprising,” she said. “Same with a piece of fish that was supposed to be white tuna. That is very often actually escolar and mislabelled as white tuna.”

What did surprise McDonald was when tilapia was passed off as red tuna.

“A fish like tuna has a very characteristic taste it has a very characteristic texture and for a place to actually be fooling people into thinking that they’re eating tuna when they’re really being served tilapia was really really surprising,” she said.

Read the full story at CBC News

MSC research counters findings of other mislabeling studies

March 26, 2019 — A new Marine Stewardship Council study has found mislabeling of its certified seafood is lower than the average of several other recent studies, which claim to have detected seafood mislabeling rates as high as 30 percent.

MSC’s expansive analysis of 1,402 MSC-certified fish products from 18 countries found that fewer than 1 percent of MSC-labeled seafood products were mislabeled.

The results were published in the journal Current Biology.

“There is widespread concern over the vulnerability of seafood supply chains to deliberate species mislabelling and fraud. In the past, this has included some of the most loved species such as cod being substituted by farmed catfish, which can seriously undermine consumer trust and efforts to maintain sustainable fisheries,” the lead of author of the paper, the MSC’s Jaco Barendse, said in an MSC press release.

The MSC’s ecolabeling and Chain of Custody program is an effective deterrent for systematic and deliberate species substitution and fraud, the organization said.

In the new study, the largest and most comprehensive assessment of MSC-labeled products, MSC worked with laboratories of the TRACE Wildlife Forensics Network and SASA’s (Science and Advice for Scottish Agriculture) Wildlife DNA Forensic unit to employ DNA barcoding.

Of the 1,402 seafood products tested, 1,389 were labeled correctly and 13 (0.92 percent) were not. Mislabeled products were found in fresh and frozen pre-packed products and in restaurants, mainly in Western Europe, with one case in the U.S. All cases of mislabeling were identified in whitefish (such as cod, hake, and hoki) and flatfish products.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Latest Oceana seafood fraud report takes aim at SIMP, but misses mark

March 20, 2019 — The intention of Oceana’s most recent report was to call for an expansion of the Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP). SIMP is an electronic traceability program designed to reduce fraud in the import of seafood into the United States. The program was created under the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018 and is managed by U.S. Customs and NOAA. Currently, SIMP requires importers to maintain records for shrimp, abalone, Atlantic cod, blue crab, dolphinfish, grouper, king crab, Pacific cod, red snapper, sea cucumber, sharks, swordfish, and tunas, detailing how they were caught or harvested and tracking the products until they reach the U.S. The program however does not extend past the importation stage – once it is in the domestic supply chain, the traceability systems end. Oceana is using their latest report as advocacy for including all seafood species (not just the ones listed above) and to extend traceability further into the supply chain past the point of importation.

Oceana sought to expose the limitations of this program by, “launching a nationwide investigation of some popular seafood types not covered by the program.” “Oceana employees and volunteers collected more than 400 samples from over 250 locations in 24 states and the District of Columbia, including restaurants, large grocery stores and smaller markets.”

Same critique of Oceana’s approach to seafood fraud

There were 29 different seafood “types” collected, but no criteria for how they chose these “types” other than they were not found in the SIMP program. Oceana used DNA testing to match the results with the label as per FDA guidelines. If something was labeled as simply “seabass”, but was more specifically Patagonian tooth, that label was considered incorrect and fraudulent. The same can be said for a label that read “snapper” but was not specific to explain which exact species. This is a critical decision by Oceana because it raises the incidence of seafood mislabeling found in restaurants where menu descriptions are often more general than in retail settings. Indeed, samples obtained in this study from restaurants were mislabeled 26% of the time compared to retail 16% of the time. As for seabass and snapper, they saw rates of mislabeling at 55% and 42%, respectively.

Oceana also attempted to exaggerate its results around catfish. Swai (Pangasius bocourti), a species of catfish, and channel catfish (Ictalurus punctatus) are two major seafood imports to the US, typically from East Asia. Some of these imported catfish species have been associated with low sustainability ratings and health concerns; there is no doubt that this is a tricky labeling situation for the FDA to monitor. But there is already a strict labeling law that requires all imported catfish species – even true channel catfish – to be labeled differently. “Catfish” can now only be on labels of US caught or farm raised catfish products, even if it is the exact same species, as is the case with channel catfish imports. This law was enacted as an economic buffer a few years ago to protect the US catfish aquaculture industry. To this end, Oceana found only 7% of catfish labels to be incorrect. To me, that is a pretty low rate for one of the most consumed seafoods in the country, but Oceana framed this result much differently.

Read the full story at Sustainable Fisheries UW

 

Seafood Fraud: Is your hake fake? Not if it’s ecolabeled!

March 19, 2019 — The following was released by the Marine Stewardship Council:

DNA barcoding of more than 1400 Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) labelled products has shown that less than 1% were mislabeled, compared with a reported average global seafood mislabeling rate of 30 percent. These results published in the journal Current Biology suggests that the MSC’s ecolabeling and Chain of Custody program is an effective deterrent for systematic and deliberate species substitution and fraud.

The MSC is a global non-profit that sets a benchmark for sustainable fishing and traceable supply chains. If fisheries and supply chain companies get certified, they can use the MSC’s blue fish label on products in stores, on fresh fish counters and on restaurant menus.

Species identification

“There is widespread concern over the vulnerability of seafood supply chains to deliberate species mislabeling and fraud. In the past, this has included some of the most loved species such as cod being substituted by farmed catfish, which can seriously undermine consumer trust and efforts to maintain sustainable fisheries,” said Jaco Barendse, Marine Stewardship Council and lead author on the paper

DNA methods have been widely used to detect species mislabelling and a recent meta-analysis of 4500 seafood product tests from 51 peer-reviewed publications found an average of 30 percent were not the species stated on the label or menu In the present study, the largest and most comprehensive assessment of MSC-labeled products, the MSC worked with laboratories of the TRACE Wildlife Forensics Network and SASA’s (Science and Advice for Scottish Agriculture) Wildlife DNA Forensic unit to employ DNA barcoding to identify the species in 1402 MSC certified fish products from 18 countries.

They found that 1389 were labeled correctly and thirteen were not. This represents a total rate of less than 1% (0.92) species mislabeling in contrast to the global average of 30%. Mislabeled products were found in fresh and frozen pre-packed products and in restaurants, mainly in western Europe, with one case in the USA. All cases of mislabeling were identified in whitefish (cods, hakes, hoki) and flatfish products.

Mislabeling or fraud?

There are many reasons that mislabeling may occur. Unintentional mislabeling can result from misidentification of species when the fish is caught, mix-ups during processing, or ambiguities in product naming, such as the use of catchall trade names such as ‘snapper’ or ‘skate’.

Fraud, on the other hand, occurs when there is intentional substitution mainly for financial gain. This is typically when a higher value species is substituted with one of lower value. Fraud may also arise when species from unsustainable or illegal fisheries gain access to the market by passing them off as legally caught fish.

While DNA testing can identify cases of species substitution, on its own it cannot confirm whether this was fraud. To do this it is necessary to trace the product’s movement back through the supply chain to identify the exact step where the issue occurred.

The MSC’s Chain of Custody certification requires that every distributor, processor, and retailer trading certified seafood has a documented traceback system that maintains separation between certified and non-certified seafood, and correctly identifies MSC products at every step.

For the thirteen mislabeled products, records were obtained from each company at each step in the supply chain. Trace-backs revealed that only two mislabeled samples could be confirmed as intentional substitutions with species of non-certified origin. MSC certified products can command higher prices and better market access than non-certified products therefore these substitutions were likely to be fraudulent. Those responsible for the substitutions had their MSC certificates suspended. There were other instances where substitutions inadvertently occurred at the point of capture or during onboard processing – likely due to misidentification between closely related, similar-looking species that co-occur in the catch. There was no discernible financial motive.

“The use of DNA tools to detect substitution in the fish supply chain is well-documented but until now has essentially revealed a depressing story. Our research flips this on its head and demonstrates how we can apply similar technology to validate the success of eco-labels in traceable, sustainable fishing,” said Rob Ogden, TRACE Wildlife Forensics Network and University of Edinburgh.

Next steps

MSC certificates apply only to fish stocks and fisheries, and not entire species. Although MSC Chain of Custody Certification requires separation of MSC and non-MSC certified products, there remains a risk for possible deliberate substitution between certified sustainable and other fish of the same species.

Francis Neat, Head of Strategic Research at the MSC said “While we can get a good indication of whether species-level substitution is taking place, using DNA barcoding and tracebacks, the future for the MSC is to invest in state-of-the-art next generation gene sequencing and isotopic and trace element profiling. This will make it possible to determine which stock a fish product came from, in addition to whether it is the species mentioned on the packaging.”

Your sea bass might be tilapia, report warns

March 8, 2019 — The incidence of seafood fraud still remains high despite more consumer awareness about the issue.

A report released Thursday morning from a nonprofit group finds that roughly 20 percent of seafood products it tested were mislabeled, deceiving customers about everything from where the fish was caught to the type of fish they are eating.

Oceana, an international organization focused on ocean restoration, started investigating the issue in 2010, testing almost 2,000 samples from 30 states for DNA identification and finding that around one-third of the samples tested were mislabeled.

“It never ceases to astonish me that we continue to uncover troubling levels of deception in the seafood we feed our families,” said Kimberly Warner, one of report’s authors.

The discovery comes at a time when seafood consumption among Americans is at a high and the U.S. is importing approximately 90 percent of the seafood it consumes.

Read the full story at Politico

What is seafood fraud? Dangerous and running rampant, report finds

March 7, 2019 — If you order a filet of snapper at a restaurant, you probably expect to be served snapper. But a new report suggests there’s a strong chance you’ll be getting something else.

Oceana, a marine conservation nonprofit with a recent history of studying seafood mislabeling, today published a new report on the state of seafood fraud in the U.S.

They found that 20 percent of the 449 fish they tested were incorrectly labeled. Orders of sea bass were often replaced by giant perch, Alaskan halibut by Greenland turbot, and Florida snapper by lavender jobfish, to name a few.

Oceana made headlines in 2016 by publishing a report finding massive seafood fraud on a global scale. Since then, NOAA created the Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP), to track 13 species deemed at high risk of being fraudulently sold or sourced illegally.

None of the 13 SIMP monitored species were sampled.

“We wanted to highlight that there are other species other than the high-risk species,” says Kimberly Warner, a senior scientist at Oceana and one of the report’s authors.

Read the full story at National Geographic

Seafood mislabeling common across North American supply chains, study finds

February 7, 2019 — New research completed at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, has found mislabeing is prevalent throughout the supply chain.

Researchers found that 32 percent of fish overall were mislabeled. The highest rate of mislabeling was at retailers (38.1 percent), followed by processing plants (27.3 percent) and importers (17.6 percent).

Conducted in collaboration with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), the study was published in the journal Food Research International.

“We’ve been doing seafood fraud studies for a decade,” Robert Hanner, the lead author of the study and associate professor at the University of Guelph, said in a press release. “We know there are problems. But this is the first study to move beyond that and look at where the problems are happening throughout the food supply chain.”

“If you can see the name is changing across the supply system, that’s a red flag,” Hanner told SeafoodSource.

Hanner said he could not definitively prove whether some of the mislabeling is intentional, but found a “pretty significant price differential” in certain substitutions, such as farmed salmon labeled as wild salmon, tilapia labeled as red snapper, and basa labeled as haddock and cod.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Class action lawsuit filed against New York retailer in wake of seafood mislabeling report

January 8, 2019 — Less than a month after the New York Attorney General’s office said it found “rampant” seafood mislabeling at New York supermarkets, one of the retailers involved faces a potential class action lawsuit.

In mid-December, the New York Attorney General’s office said it found that around a quarter of the seafood sampled at New York grocery retailers was mislabeled. While Oceana and universities have studied retail seafood mislabeling, the New York AG’s report is the first major U.S. government investigation of seafood fraud within supermarket chains.

The AG office found that a small subset of supermarket brands – Food Bazaar, Foodtown, Stew Leonard’s, Uncle Giuseppe’s, and Western Beef – were responsible for a “vastly disproportionate share of suspected mislabeling” in New York.

Now, Shelby Franklin, a New York consumer, is suing Norwalk, Connecticut-based Stew Leonard’s over its allegedly mislabeled wild sockeye salmon and red snapper.

The class action complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, alleges that Stew Leonard’s “routinely took advantage of consumers’ preferences for certain fish species and characteristics by labeling and passing off low-demand, less healthy, and less environmentally-friendly fish as more desirable, healthier, and more sustainable varieties of fish.”

Read the full story at Seafood Source

‘Wild’ Salmon May Be Straight From the Farm, NY Report Finds

December 17, 2018 — That wild sockeye salmon in the refrigerated aisle may be straight from the fish farm, New York’s attorney general said in a report released Friday.

The report from Attorney General Barbara Underwood found that more than one-fourth of the seafood her office sampled in a statewide supermarket survey was mislabeled, typically as a more expensive or more sustainably fished species.

“We’re taking enforcement action, and consumers should be alert and demand that their supermarket put customers first by taking serious steps to ensure quality control at their seafood counters,” Underwood said.

The report was based on DNA testing of fish samples performed by the Ocean Genome Legacy Center, an academic laboratory at Northeastern University.

It found that farmed salmon was frequently sold as wild, and fish sold as red snapper or lemon sole were more often different varieties.

The investigation is not the first to uncover fish fraud.

A 2017 study from researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles and Loyola Marymount University found that almost half the sushi from 26 Los Angeles restaurants that they tested between 2012 and 2015 was mislabeled.

An Associated Press investigation into seafood fraud published in June linked one national fish distributor to widespread mislabeling and other deceitful practices.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at U.S. News

Mislabeled seafood in the U.S.

December 7, 2018 — The 2018 Oceana Canada study was only the most recent of a series of similar studies published by Oceana (see my earlier piece here). In 2016, Oceana released a report that summarized and mapped seafood fraud from, “more than 200 published studies covering 55 different countries, on every continent except Antarctica, in order to reveal the global scope of seafood fraud.” Oceana found relevant studies by searching Google Scholar and Google News with relevant search terms. Further, legal cases involving seafood fraud in the United States were collected in NOAA Law Enforcement or Department of Justice press releases and archives. The final collection was displayed on this map.

In this post, I will attempt to contextualize Oceana’s findings in the US specifically. I aim to challenge the report title that this map study “reveal[ed] the global scale of seafood swapping”, and instead suggest that it provided an unrepresentative view of mislabeling in the context of actual seafood consumption trends in the U.S.

The vast majority of the studies collected by Oceana (>75%) were from Europe or the US and, “the bulk of the studies [were] conducted after 2005.” Globally, Oceana reported the weighted average mislabeling rate was 19%, but in the U.S., it was 28%. The most commonly mislabeled species in the US studies referenced were snapper, grouper, and salmon. Across all studies referenced (US and abroad) Oceana reported mislabeling in “all 200+ studies reviewed except one.”

Pins were placed on the world map to indicate the location of each mislabeling study collected for this report. The pins were color coded to indicate the extent of mislabeling, and to indicate if the study was an Oceana study or a study from another source like news media or peer reviewed literature. Dark red indicated studies showing mislabeling rates from 75%-100%; lighter red indicated mislabeling rates from 50%-75%; dark pink indicated rates from 25%-50%; light pink indicated rates from 0%-25%; a white pin with black pinstripes indicated a study featuring “other examples of fraud”; and a blue Oceana logo pin indicated an Oceana study.

Read the full story at Sustainable Fisheries UW