Yesterday, Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), sent a short letter to the ten highest grossing seafood restaurants in the United States – including Red Lobster, Long John Silver’s, and Legal Sea Foods – to directly communicate the agency’s recent guidance warning restaurants against falsely or misleadingly implying that they are serving domestic wild-caught seafood when what is actually being served is foreign, pond-raised shrimp and fish.
Country-of-origin labeling rules administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture provide consumers with information regarding the source and production type of shrimp sold at grocery stores. However, no similar federal law or regulation requires similar disclosures at restaurants. Following the efforts of local shrimp industry groups, the state governments in Louisiana and Alabama have adopted rules requiring country-of-origin disclosure in food service establishments operating in their states. But in the rest of the country, unless a restaurant volunteers to provide information regarding its sourcing of seafood, customers are unable to determine where the shrimp on the menu is from.
Some national restaurant chains and local restaurants have abused the lack of disclosure requirements by marketing foreign, pond-raised shrimp with imagery of the U.S. commercial shrimp industry or through words and phrasing that would otherwise imply that the farm-raised shrimp was wild-caught. In presentations and written submissions to the FTC, the Southern Shrimp Alliance provided the agency with specific, egregious examples of these misleading marketing practices, including nationwide media campaigns featuring actors dressed as commercial shrimpers onboard fishing vessels hawking foreign, pond-raised shrimp.
In his letter, Commissioner Bedoya observed that “[m]any Americans are willing to pay a premium for wild-caught, American seafood. Those customers deserve to know when they are being offered the genuine article – and when they are being offered something else.” While the correspondence explained that it was not a warning or a notice of investigation, Commissioner Bedoya concluded the letter by stating “I will not hesitate to request a law enforcement investigation if I am presented with credible evidence of a law violation.”
“The Federal Trade Commission’s efforts to make clear that misleading marketing of farmed seafood in restaurants is a violation of law is incredibly important to the families of commercial shrimpers across the United States,” said John Williams, Executive Director of the Southern Shrimp Alliance. “There is nothing wrong with restaurants serving foreign farmed shrimp to their customers, but it is flat-out wrong to use our industry to market imports. If restaurants want to sell foreign pond-raised shrimp, they should do so with the imagery of those industries, including the armed guards watching over workers, the pharmacies providing veterinary drugs, and the devastation of local estuaries that have to take the farms’ wastewater.”
Read Commissioner Alvaro M. Bedoya’s October 1, 2024 letter here: https://shrimpalliance.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Bedoya-Oct-2-Letter.pdf
Read the Federal Trade Commission’s Business Blog entry Mind Your Net Impression: When Seafood Is Not Wild, Fresh-Caught, or Local here: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2024/09/mind-your-net-impression-when-seafood-not-wild-fresh-caught-or-local