Outer Banks residents and visitors seek out local seafood at restaurants, and are often told by menus or servers that’s what is on their plate. But recent research shows that half of tested Outer Banks restaurants served imported or farm-raised shrimp, and all but one advertised differently.
SeaD Consulting aims to protect the seafood industry and its authenticity, and worked on behalf of the Southern Shrimp Alliance, a group of shrimp fishermen, processors and others in warm water shrimp producing states. Using genetic technology the company developed with Florida State University, SeaD researchers tested 22 Outer Banks restaurants between June 18 and 23. The restaurants were chosen from a randomized list of the 44 previous establishments tested in December.
Chief Operations Officer and co-founder Erin Williams traveled to the restaurants and took samples from shrimp dishes. Eleven of the 22 came back as American wild-caught shrimp, and the other half were imported or farm raised. Of those, 10 restaurants advertised otherwise.
“A lot of these restaurants tell you that it’s an American wild-caught product, whether they say local shrimp, North Carolina shrimp, and sometimes they’ll go as far into an elaborate, ‘We get it from the boats right down there off the dock,’” Williams said. “It comes together as a great story, but oftentimes, that’s not the case.”
The 50-50 chance in the Outer Banks is a positive to December’s testing, which had authenticity rates of 36%, with 16 of the 44 restaurants serving American wild-caught shrimp.
The full list of Outer Banks restaurants serving American wild-caught shrimp as of June is on the Southern Shrimp Alliance website. The report does not disclose the restaurants that were determined to be serving imported or farm-raised shrimp.
Founder and commercial fishery scientist Dave Williams said the genetic test, the RIGHTTest, checks if restaurants serve Pacific whiteleg shrimp, which doesn’t exist in the Gulf. This tells the researchers it’s not American wild-caught shrimp.
“You’re not expecting to eat seafood that’s been grown in a pond in India or Ecuador,” Dave Williams said. “American wild-caught shrimp isn’t fed anything unnatural and doesn’t contain any form of antibiotics. But our main objective is to allow the consumer to make a choice.”
Cost is the primary reason restaurants choose not to serve American wild-caught shrimp, according to Erin Williams. SeaD often found that the falsely advertised dishes were just as, or sometimes more, expensive than genuine American wild-caught shrimp.
“The economic factor is definitely an incentive,” Erin Williams said. “If you can pay less for a different type of shrimp and say it’s premium, you can charge more.”
Seafood restaurants also have told SeaD researchers the American-wild caught shrimp industry doesn’t have the consistent supply they need.
“The truth of the matter is, it takes a little bit of effort and having those connections to get that supply and know where to source it from,” Erin Williams said. “And it’s sometimes easier to just go through a larger distributor.”
In states with laws that require restaurants to disclose the origins of shrimp, inauthenticity rates are much lower than in states without that legislation, Dave Williams said.
For example, Louisiana first adopted a seafood disclosure law in 2008, prohibiting restaurants from misrepresenting imported shrimp. An amendment in 2025 requires establishments to explicitly state seafood’s origins. SeaD has found an inauthenticity rate of 25% in Louisiana.
SeaD Consulting’s goal is to see this type of legislation enacted across the country to “ensure that what the customer orders is what the customer gets,” Dave Williams said.
“It’s promising to see that there’s change being made,” Erin Williams said. “But for the sake of our coastal fishing communities and diners who go there to enjoy that, we’d like to see that improvement.”
Maggie Allwein, 757-672-3310, maggie.allwein@virginiamedia.com
Dining and Cooking