Acy Cooper Jr., center, director of the Louisiana Shrimp Association, talks with shrimpers Louie Barthelemy, 69, left, and Rondey Andry, 41, right, in Buras on Wednesday, December 4, 2024. (Photo by Chris Granger, The Times-Picayune)
Erin Williams, the COO of SeaD, explained that the company takes only a sample of restaurants throughout a given city. Releasing the names of the places misleading companies would let untested restaurants doing the same thing off the hook.
“We don’t want to point out some bad guys when there’s a large percentage of bad guys we didn’t catch,” Erin Williams said.
‘We want to give consumers a choice’
The 30 percent mislabeling figure for Baton Rouge restaurants was lower than what was found in other Gulf Coast testing. Earlier this month, SeaD found that 82 percent of sampled restaurants in Biloxi, Mississippi were misleading customers over their shrimp products.
In September, SeaD found that four out of five vendors at the annual Shrimp and Petroleum Festival in Morgan City were selling imported shrimp. The company saw similar findings at a shrimp festival in Gulf Shores, Alabama. A New Orleans shrimp festival organized after the Morgan City event turned up all local catch, SeaD confirmed.
