Turning the Tide: Sushi Mislabeling Has Declined in L.A. Restaurants, LMU Study Finds

LOS ANGELES - Seafood mislabeling has declined in Los Angeles since a team of scientists years ago began collecting sushi samples from area restaurants and grocers to understand how they were being marketed to consumers, a Loyola Marymount University study has found.

The findings, published in the international journal Food Control, offer reasons for optimism following 10 years of research and lab testing, and extensive collaboration among academics, government agencies, and industry stakeholders, including restaurants and fisheries.

"Never has a study tracked mislabeling for so long, nor has a study been able to show a significant change due to intervention," said Demian Willette, associate professor of biology in LMU Frank R. Seaver College of Science and Engineering, and the article's lead author. "Our findings illustrate that awareness and intervention are critical to our ongoing efforts to reduce fraudulent labeling in seafood."

The new research found 65% drop in mislabeling rates for participating restaurants in the Los Angeles Seafood Monitoring Project, and a 19% decline overall in the average rate of mislabeled samples collected in Los Angeles over a 10-year period. The monitoring project is a partnership of stakeholders in academia, industry, and government working together to identify and understand the factors around inaccurate labels.

"We found mislabeling was three-fold lower among project-partnering restaurants than other restaurants," the authors wrote. "This difference was statistically significant, illustrating the combination of project partnering and implementation of recommendations was most impactful on reducing mislabeling rates."

Jerry A. Greenberg, co-founder and CEO of Sushi Nozawa Group (SUGARFISH/KazuNori/Nozawa Bar), credited the decline in mislabeling to collaboration among Los Angeles Seafood Monitoring Project participants.

"This success was achieved because people across disciplines got together to fix a problem that we all saw as solvable," said Greenberg, who was involved from the onset. "Positive change happens when restaurants, government, and researchers sit down at the same table and work toward solutions."

In 2017, Willette and researchers from UCLA published a study in the journal Conservation Biology explaining their use of DNA markers to analyze seafood mislabeling in Los Angeles over four years at 26 restaurants, and over one year at three high-end grocery stores. The team targeted nine popular sushi fish, including red snapper, yellowtail, halibut, mackerel, salmon, and four varieties of tuna: albacore, yellowfin, bigeye and bluefin. Between 2012 and 2015, students ordered the fish at restaurants and took samples back to their labs for DNA analysis.

What they discovered was startling: Nearly half - 47% - of all types of fish sold in L.A. sushi restaurants and stores were believed to have incorrect labels.

Their research quickly grabbed headlines - with reports of "fake fish," "sushi scams" and "duped diners" - and raised questions about laws intended to stem seafood fraud, the term used when a fish of one variety or even a different species is labeled as a more popular fish to circumvent environmental regulations or meet market demands.

The Los Angeles Seafood Monitoring Project was an offshoot of their research and the publicity it generated. The multi-year initiative aimed to improve seafood literacy ​and to combat mislabeling by leveraging ​evidence-based science and molecular genetic DNA testing of seafood sold by restaurants, sushi venues, grocery stores, and seafood processors in the Los Angeles area.

The project acknowledged that mislabeling is a societal problem pervasive in both the international and domestic fish trade, and the reasons are varied. Mislabeling can be accidental if resulting from species misidentification, incorrect assignment of a common name, or the loss of product information in the supply chain. But it can also be intentional to increase profit or launder fish captured illegally into the legal food trade.

While the documented decline is mislabeling is a positive development, the Food Control article explains that "further reductions in the most egregious cases (of seafood mislabeling) are achievable." For example, in recent years the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has added the Japanese name madai as an accepted market name for sea bream, and kanpachi for amberjack.

"Current FDA guidelines only permit the use of English names for most of this study's targeted fish types," the authors write. "We encourage regulators to consider the addition of additional Japanese names as accepted names, which may help reduce mislabeling attributed to being lost in translation."