Saving Seafood

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

DON CUDDY: Seafood comes in many forms — how fresh is yours?

November 27, 2018 — We live, as we are often reminded, in the top grossing fishing port in the United States and have some of the planet’s most productive fishing grounds right off our shores. So for those among us who enjoy and appreciate the harvest of the sea, and its clean, healthy, wild-caught protein, there is no better place to live than New Bedford. Lately however I have begun to wonder just how many people around the SouthCoast are fish eaters and include our excellent seafood as a regular part of their diet? Apart from perhaps ordering fish and chips or fried scallops in a restaurant on a Friday night that is. That counts certainly but what I have in mind is selecting some seafood at the market and bringing it home.

I regularly enjoy eating all kinds of great seafood at my house. In the past couple of weeks, I have bought, prepared and eaten swordfish, yellowfin tuna, haddock, scallops and oysters, all of it fresh and of surpassing excellence. On the other hand I have read that the vast majority of seafood consumed in the USA is confined to just three varieties — shrimp, salmon and canned tuna. I’m not a fan of shrimp nowadays as most of it is imported, farmed in Southeast Asia under dubious conditions, and I find the end product to be devoid of flavor. Decades ago when I lived in Miami, I would catch shrimp, one at a time, using a dip net and lantern as they entered Biscayne Bay via Government Cut so I know what wild shrimp tastes like.

Salmon fares a little better chez moi although wild salmon runs have all but disappeared on the East Coast and the commonly used marketing term ‘Atlantic salmon’ means that it is raised in pens, predominantly in the Canadian Maritimes and Norway. Both of these items enjoy great popularity in the restaurant trade and you will frequently find salmon and shrimp on seafood menus where even such New England staples such as cod and haddock are absent. But even at the local fish counter there is a high probability that the cod and haddock on offer, while fresh, is not caught or landed here.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

As the guilty pleas pile up in tuna case, will consumers ever get anything back?

November 6, 2018 — First, Chicken of the Sea came forward as a whistleblower. Last year, Bumble Bee Foods pleaded guilty, followed by StarKist Co. in October.

The big three tuna companies — familiar names on the shelves of your nearest grocery store — have been under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice for keeping the price of canned and pouched tuna artificially high.

It’s a high-level antitrust case involving lots of big companies, but it’s also the kind of case that reaches all the way down to the grocery store checkout and family budgets.

Thomas Burt, an attorney with the law firm Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz, said with consumer cases like this, “Psychologically, these hit home in a way that others don’t.”

“If a group of companies fix the price of basic industrial chemicals or computer chips that we use in the devices around us, the psychological distance is further. We don’t feel it as directly,” Mr. Burt said. “This is a product that people have a relationship with. They know this brand. They’ve eaten it since they were kids.

“It’s a kick in the pants for consumers,” he said.

It remains to be seen if consumers will be directly compensated in some way, and, if so, how.

The packaged seafood market, which also includes salmon, shrimp, clams and the like, is a multibillion-dollar industry in the United States. Tuna represents about 73 percent of the market and generates about $1.7 billion in annual sales, according to court documents.

Read the full story at The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Grouper, snapper, cod? Mislabeling is rampant in the seafood industry

October 22, 2018 — Recent investigations and studies have shown mislabeling – sometimes due to error but often the result of outright fraud – is rampant in the seafood industry, showing up both in the marketplace and on restaurant menus.

One study of retailers found seafood like grouper, cod and snapper may be mislabeled up to 87 percent of the time, swapped out for less desirable and cheaper varieties. For example, only seven of the 120 samples of red snapper were actually red snapper.

CBS News’ Meg Oliver spoke to Vinny Millbourn, who hails from a long line of fishermen. The fishmonger at Greenpoint Fish and Lobster Company in Brooklyn, New York, specializes in local, domestic and traceable species. His storefront acts as a fish market, raw bar and restaurant.

“It’s a very big problem and the issue is once it’s prepared, there’s really no way to check it other than DNA testing which a lot of companies are now doing,” Millbourn said. “So I have a have a network of small boat fisherman and wharfs all over the country that are shipping to me daily through the air or by truck. And we are processing every single day to bring in high-quality fresh seafood.”

Millbourn not only knows where his fish come from he can tell a tale about each one. That personal connection is hard to find, but is a good sign. It’s estimated that more than 90 percent of the seafood consumed in the U.S. is imported, and less than one percent is tested by the government.

Read the full story at CBS News

StarKist admits fixing tuna prices, faces $100 million fine

October 22, 2018 — StarKist Co. agreed to plead guilty to a felony price fixing charge as part of a broad collusion investigation of the canned tuna industry, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Thursday.

The DOJ said StarKist faces up to a $100 million fine when it is sentenced. Prosecutors allege that the industry’s top three companies conspired between 2010 and 2013 to keep prices artificially high.

“We have cooperated with the DOJ during the course of its investigation and accept responsibility,” said StarKist chief executive Andrew Choe. “We will continue to conduct our business with the utmost transparency and integrity.”

StarKist is owned by South Korean company Dongwon Industries, one of the largest tuna catching companies in the world. The parent company’s website carries pledges to abide by ethical standards and good corporate citizenship.

The scheme came to light when Thai Union Group’s Chicken of the Sea attempt to buy San Diego-based Bumble Bee failed in 2015, according to court records. Chicken of the Sea executives then alerted federal investigators, who agreed to shield the company from criminal prosecution in exchange for cooperation.

Bumble Bee Foods last year pleaded guilty to the same charge and paid a $25 million fine, $111 million lower than prosecutors said it should have been. Prosecutors said they feared putting the financially struggling Bumble Bee out of business with a high fine and agreed to let the company make interest-free payments for five years.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Gloucester Daily Times

‘Laxative of the sea’ being passed off as premium fish in Canada

August 29, 2018 — Canadian consumers forking out for seafood are not getting what they pay for. What masquerades as sea bass, cod or wild salmon could be a far cheaper catfish, pollock or even a fish dubbed “the laxative of the sea”, according to a national report from advocacy organization Oceana Canada.

That poses a serious risk to consumers’ pockets — and public health.

Roughly 44 per cent of fish were incorrectly labelled, the report found. What’s more, 60 per cent of the roughly 400 samples collected from retailers in Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto, Ottawa and Halifax were found to carry potential health risks.

Instead of butterfish, consumers have been eating escolar — an oily fish that has been called “the laxative of the sea” and can cause diarrhea, vomiting and other stomach problems — which is banned in several countries, such as Japan, South Korea and Italy. Escolar was also a substitute for white tuna.

This, researchers say, is rampant seafood fraud, defined as any activity that misrepresents the seafood being purchased.

Read the full story at The Star Vancouver