'Shrimp fraud' rampant at many Gulf Coast restaurants, new studies find

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Restaurants throughout the Gulf Coast are serving imported shrimp but telling their customers they're feasting on fresh crustaceans fished in the Gulf of Mexico, a series of new studies found.

SeaD Consulting, a food safety technology company, tested shrimp from randomly chosen restaurants in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Biloxi, Mississippi; Galveston, Texas; and Tampa Bay, Florida. Researchers found a significant number of the restaurants were passing off their shrimp as locally sourced, even though they were grown on foreign farms and imported to the U.S.

The cities with the highest "shrimp fraud rate" were Tampa Bay and St. Petersburg, Florida, at 96%, according to SeaD Consulting. Only two of the 44 restaurants sampled were serving authentic shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico, a study found.

The tests in other cities yielded similar results. In Biloxi, 82% of the restaurants "were defrauding consumers about what they were buying," SeaD said. In Galveston, 59% of the 44 restaurants it sampled served imported shrimp while claiming they were caught locally. In Baton Rouge, researchers sampled menu items at 24 restaurants and found nearly 30% – more than 1 in 4 – were misrepresented.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/shrimp-fraud-found-rampant-many-173137438.html