Does Your Seafood Label Look Fishy? You May Be On To Something Chapman researchers found that 40% of America’s most popular seafoods are mislabeled. Why should we care?

Americans ate an average of 20 pounds of seafood each in 2021. The United States is the top importer of seafood, one of the planet’s most-traded food goods.

The catch is, the label on the can, package, menu or supermarket counter may not be accurate. Indeed, nearly 40% of labels may not be, according to a comprehensive analysis by Chapman University researchers.

“We wanted to look at mislabeling rates of what people are consuming the most,” says Associate Professor of Food Science Rosalee Hellberg, who led the study. 

Casting a Wide Net

Hellberg, food science alumna Sarah Ahles (MS ’24) and Oregon State University Professor Christina DeWitt looked at the big picture of seafood mislabeling, trawling data from 35 studies covering more than 4,100 seafood samples collected since 2010.

Their goal was to compile a single resource about U.S. seafood mislabeling. The study is the first meta-analysis of mislabeling of U.S. retail seafood and the first study of mislabeling rates for the top 10 consumed seafoods in the country. Hellberg and Ahles say their study has the potential to influence policy decisions and improve public trust in the seafood industry.

The researchers found an overall mislabeling rate of 39.1% over the 35 studies. The leading form of mislabeling was species substitution at 26.1%, then unacceptable market names at 17.1% and conflicting market names at 1.1%. 

The breakdown is important because the types of mislabeling are different. The leading offender, species substitution, is representing tilapia as red snapper. An unacceptable market name is giving a product a name that is not on the Food and Drug Administration’s Seafood List. A conflicting market name is giving a product the names of two or more species, like “rockfish red snapper.”

“There have been some U.S. seafood studies in the past but they never broke into different mislabeling categories,” says Hellberg, associate director of the food science program at Schmid College of Science and Technology.

Hellberg says the seafood industry is prone to mislabeling because of rising demand, complex global supply chains, similar appearance of species and wide price variation.

Global seafood demand per capita is expected to grow to 160 million metric tons—a rise of about 20%—by the middle of the century, according to a 2024 seafood forecast out of Norway. Meanwhile, human rights abuses have been reported in the seafood industry in China and India. China supplies some of the largest U.S. and European restaurant and grocery chains, and a third of the shrimp Americans eat comes from India, according to a damning Time magazine piece.

Forced labor has been reported on hundreds of Chinese fishing vessels and in Chinese processing plants. Because the plants use North Korean and Uyghur workers, their products are banned from the U.S. In India, a whistleblower helped expose alleged captive and forced labor, environmental concerns and possible antibiotic contamination in shrimp processing plants. 

Restaurants and supermarkets must fix their supply chains, the Time article concluded. Consumers need to know what they’re buying and that retailers are in compliance with FDA labeling guidelines, Hellberg says.

As Hellberg continues her research, she’ll be sure to keep seafood companies accountable to consumers.

Why Should Consumers Care?

If a label isn’t accurate, it could impact people with religious dietary restrictions or those who eat only environmentally sustainable seafood, according to the study.

Consumers can also be exposed to allergens or toxins in certain seafood species, the most known being mercury. A label on ceviche, for example, may say fish but contain shrimp or other species that a consumer could be allergic to. Escolar, a fish sometimes mislabeled as white tuna or sea bass, can cause gastrointestinal issues and has been banned in Japan and Italy.

“It’s substituted so people don’t actually know it’s escolar,” Hellberg says.

A potential silver lining is that the overall mislabeling rate for the top 10 consumed seafoods in the U.S. was 31%, compared to 53% for the most investigated species.

Suppliers can make more money by substituting a popular species like salmon, Hellberg says. But the analysis didn’t examine the reasons for mislabeling.

“It’s so hard to prove what the intention was behind the mislabeling,” she says. “If there was an economic advantage to mislabeling, it was more intentional … if they had multiple mislabeling events, it’s an indication of intention.”

Some companies aren’t paying attention to the FDA’s guidelines for market labeling. And restaurants sometimes come up with creative names for seafood.

One interesting finding was that the overall mislabeling rate was highest in restaurants (55.4%) and lowest in grocery stores (26.2%), Ahles says.

Sushi and sashimi samples were among the most mislabeled products, which could explain the higher rate in restaurants, the researchers say.

What Should Consumers Do?

In light of widespread mislabeling, Hellberg and Ahles recommend buying seafood from reputable companies and looking for abnormal labeling and pricing. It’s also important to know where the products you purchase come from and look at a company’s food safety practices. At a restaurant, ask questions about what’s on the menu.

“Become really familiar with the types of products that you like to consume,” Hellberg says.

“Consumers may not be able to prevent it if the seafood they’re looking at has been substituted for something that’s inferior quality or taste or even conservation status,” says Ahles, who now works at Olli Salumeria in Oceanside. “However, you can educate yourself about price and look for certifications that you support.”

Equipping consumers with the knowledge to make informed decisions is an important motivator for Hellberg’s research. In particular, she has focused on seafood, including shrimp and a range of fish.

She and her co-authors found in a January 2024 study that a third of more than 100 frozen samples of shrimp—America’s top-consumed seafood—from Orange County stores were mislabeled and/or weighed less than the packages said. Hellberg has also studied mislabeling in the pantry staple canned tuna, catfish and fish fillets and examined commercial shark products. In 2022, she and three graduate students used DNA sequencing to find species substitution and mislabeling in more than 100 samples of ceviche, poke and sushi dishes from Orange County restaurants.

Read more from Chapman Forward magazine.