DNA Retesting of Shrimp Show Restaurants Still Serve Imported Products
By Rick McCann
Blue RAM Media/Gulf Coast News
October 23, 2025
GULF SHORES, Ala.
Some local restaurants are still in violation of the Alabama Seafood Labeling Law, which went into effect in October of 2024.
A DNA firm which recently tested shrimp at local restaurants and at the National Shrimp Festival to see if businesses were falsely identifying where their products came from as once again gone out and retested restaurants that were tested earlier in the year.
Surprisingly, restaurants and shrimp sellers have continued falsely identifying the origin of their shrimp.
SeaD Consulting, a Texas-based group, conducted its initial study March 23-27 on behalf of the Southern Shrimp Alliance.
The alliance is “an organization of shrimp fishermen, shrimp processors, and other members of the domestic industry in the eight warmwater shrimp producing states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas,” its website states.
During the DNA testing that was done earlier in the year, the company said that they had tested 44 restaurants in Gulf Shores to determine if they were serving American wild-caught shrimp or non-domestic shrimp, and of those 44 restaurants tested in March, 22 have been retested in October of 2025.
Of those that were tested, “10 out of 22 (sampled restaurants) were serving imports (46%) vs. 19 out of 44 (43%) previously tested in March 2025,” the group said.
SeaD staff used what the group called a Rapid ID Genetic High-Accuracy Test.
The group’s results also indicated that three restaurants that marketed American wild-caught shrimp now serve non-domestic.
Additionally, two restaurants reportedly now serve wild-caught domestic shrimp after initial testing in March showed the opposite.
However, some shrimp marketed as wild-caught and domestic allegedly did not match their labels.
Of the 10 restaurants in the recent testing, nine were “outright claiming to serve domestic shrimp,” when that wasn’t the case, the group said.
But restaurants’ actions may not directly result in mislabeling items.
That’s because “…mislabeling or substitution can occur at any point in the supply chain,” Blake Price, Deputy Director of the Southern Shrimp Alliance, said.
Still, he said, “it is ultimately the consumer who is misled — and that is unacceptable.”
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