Food News

Do you like prawns and shrimps? Then it could be interesting to read the paper by Félix Gil and co-workers who performed a study about mislabelled products in Spanish supermarkets.

Shrimps and prawns belong to the crustaceae family of Penaoidea. They are available for seafood lovers all over the world. In the EU most of these products are imported from South America and Asia e.g. from Ecuador, India, Vietnam, Thailand & Indonesia. The labelling rules say, that the products need to be labelled with the full scientific species name. But the producers often fail to label the seafood correctly. There are different reasons for mislabelling.

It can happen

• by purpose, because profit reasons (price difference),or
• unintentionally because of lack of knowledge or misunderstanding the legal requirements

Therefore, species identification is now carried out by genome analysis. DNA sequencing and PCR methods to detect specific DNA markers are the most common methods used to determine the correct species name.

The authors of the study took 94 commercial (mostly frozen) samples of 55 different products from Spanish retail stores and supermarkets and examined them using the above-mentioned techniques, which are also used in our laboratories.

Guess how many turned out to be mislabelled?

In almost 30% of the samples examined, the species labelling on the label was incorrect, and 95% of these samples came from the freezers.

Products from the Pacific fishing grounds were significantly more often incorrectly labelled than, for example, goods from aquaculture and other geographical origins.

By contrast, hardly any incorrect labelling was found in fresh/cooked shrimps, especially from specialist retailers.

YOUR PLUS: AGROLAB LUFA has many years of experience in the species identification of seafood and can check your products for correct species labelling, so that your labels carry correct species designations and do not give rise to complaints.

Author: Dr. Frank Mörsberger AGROLAB