The Shrimp Industry’s Jumbo Problem

Late last year, Louisiana Republican John Kennedy stood on the floor of the US Senate to inveigh against the evils of foreign shrimp and space aliens. Kennedy was standing in front of a placard bearing a still photo from the famous scene in Alien where the title creature bursts forth from John Hurt’s chest. The senator told his colleagues (and at least one impressively stone-faced Senate page) that if they didn’t stick to American-caught shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico, they might well suffer a similar fate. “This is what you could end up looking like if you eat some of the raw, frozen shrimp being sent to the United States by other countries,” Kennedy said. “Even if it doesn’t turn you into the alien if you eat this stuff, I guarantee you will grow an extra ear.”

There’s no evidence that imported shrimp has given anyone a new appendage or faced off against Sigourney Weaver, but Kennedy was alluding to a real issue. Early in July 2025, inspectors at the Port of Los Angeles discovered traces of cesium-137, a radioactive isotope, in a shipment of shrimp from a processing plant in Cikande, Indonesia. They halted and, eventually, destroyed the shipment, from importer PT Bahari Makmur Sejati, better known as BMS Foods. Astonishingly, according to records reviewed by Bloomberg Businessweek, US Customs and Border Protection had allowed BMS to continue importing shrimp through other American ports for months afterward, including for several weeks after the first in a series of BMS shrimp recalls issued by the US Food and Drug Administration. By the start of last fall, Customs had reversed course, but by that point, affected shrimp had already made it to store shelves.

Eventually, BMS shrimp were recalled from grocery stores across the country, affecting almost every major retailer in some way. If you noticed an empty display at your local Walmart or Kroger around that time, that’s why. BMS, Indonesia’s largest shrimp exporter, didn’t respond to requests for comment for this article. Customs referred questions to the FDA, which declined to comment beyond the text of its first recall. “All containers and product testing positive or alerting for Cs-137 have been denied entry into the country,” the FDA said in that announcement. Nathan Rickard, a trade lawyer who reviewed the government’s inspection records, describes its conduct as inconsistent and unprecedented. The FDA would be “hard-pressed to explain how they knew that that stuff that came in wasn’t contaminated,” Rickard says. “Nobody ever checked it.”

“The entire food system is completely broken.”

Carl Safina, ecologist

In some ways, America’s love affair with shrimp reads like a sales pitch for the concept of free trade. Until the mid-20th century, shrimp was a delicacy in the US. Today, it’s the nation’s most popular seafood, a commodity that can still feel like a deal as other grocery prices soar. Global shrimp prices have actually fallen over the past five years, from $8 a pound to closer to $7. As Red Lobster once again loves to remind us, our shrimp supply can seem downright endless. And Americans have imports from Latin America and Southeast Asia to thank for that. Of the 1.7 billion pounds of shrimp the US plows through in a year, foreign suppliers account for more than 90%, an even larger majority than they provide for other seafood. Indonesia alone sells the US roughly $2 billion worth of shrimp in a typical year.

This is to say, Kennedy’s call for Americans to eat only the local stuff is a fantasy. The typical imported shrimp remain cheaper and far more available than their homegrown cousins, despite all the logistics involved and a wave of Trump tariffs aimed at helping US shrimpers compete. But as illustrated by the BMS recalls, there are lots of hidden costs too, costs to standards for labor, to the environment and, most notably for consumers, to food safety. Gathering almost all of America’s shrimp supply overseas has made quality much tougher to oversee.

The occasional massive, shameful Gulf oil spill notwithstanding, America’s commercial fishers adhere to some of the strictest environmental, labor, health and safety laws in the world. More than 50% of the world’s seafood is farmed, under variably safe conditions, in ways that can be harmful to US consumers as well as foreign workers and shorelines. “The entire food system is completely broken,” says ecologist Carl Safina, who’s documented the environmental damage from fish farms in Southeast Asia. In the era of cyclospora and screwworm, the Make America Healthy Again set hasn’t exactly been extending itself to take a closer look.

The BMS recalls made clear why this should matter to everyone in this delicious food chain. Although tests suggested that the contaminated shrimp wouldn’t pose a significant health risk to consumers unless eaten in large amounts, that’s exactly what Americans do. And shortly after the FDA announced the first of its recalls, the affected processing plant in Cikande was declared a hazardous zone, cordoned off by workers in hazmat suits. You wouldn’t confuse one for the spacesuit that poor, doomed John Hurt wears while inspecting the mysterious egg room in Alien, but neither experience would make you crave a shrimp cocktail. When Businessweek visited Cikande months later, trucks were still subject to radiation testing in the affected area.

Jeremy Zirlott, a fifth-generation shrimper in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, hopes to convince American consumers that wild-caught shrimp is a kind of delicacy, worth paying a bit more for in an era of farmed seafood.

For the most part, consumers shrugged at Cesiumgate and kept eating. Still, for American shrimpers who’ve been struggling to make a living on low, low prices for decades, the episode seemed to hint at the promise of a different kind of business model, one that might augur better outcomes for the environment and workers around the world. Those with a certain degree of means are now doing their best to emphasize the provenance of their catch, focusing on quality and reliability in tandem with the usual made-in-America-isms. “This is a good, productive industry,” says Jeremy Zirlott, a fifth-generation shrimper in Bayou La Batre, Alabama. “We can’t just outsource everything.” Zirlott is known for his royal reds, a deepwater Gulf shrimp that fetches a premium.

Such efforts aren’t going to end the commoditization of the $79 billion global shrimp industry anytime soon. And Zirlott is quick to acknowledge that local productivity doesn’t necessarily translate into profits. “If no one else is fighting for our industry, it is going to go away,” he says. What he and his peers are betting is that they can persuade a critical mass of Americans to see a certain kind of shrimp — theirs — as a delicacy again.

In the 1980s, the Gulf states supplied about 60% of America’s shrimp. For generations of shrimpers, the catch offered a freedom they couldn’t have dreamed of on an oil rig or in the military. “I was always chasing shrimp,” says Zirlott, who started in the business around that time. “That was my hunt.” Yet even as demand for shrimp has trended steadily upward, wholesale prices have stayed more or less the same since the Reagan era, making the lives of Gulf shrimpers more difficult. Localized disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon haven’t helped, but what really transformed the global shrimp market was the explosion of shrimp farming in Southeast Asia in the 2000s.

Shrimp lagged the global shift toward farmed seafood until producers in Asia stopped farming monodon, a shrimp native to Africa, Asia and Australia, and shifted to vannamei, a white shrimp from South America. The latter shrimp could grow in higher densities, mature to full size in a scant three months and tolerate less salty water, meaning they could be farmed inland. Farming vannamei enabled countries including China, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and India to radically scale up their shrimp production. While the promise of aquaculture usually revolves around domestic food security, in this case American wholesalers were offering better prices. Now, Asia accounts for around two-thirds of global shrimp output, while Ecuador is the biggest single exporter nation.

For shrimpers like Zirlott, the stresses of competing in a commoditized global market have taken their toll. Gulf wholesalers above a certain size have had to get used to renting extra freezer space from third-party storage companies when shrimp prices dip, gambling that those prices will rise quickly enough for the shrimp to be worth selling again. The math became even less forgiving for a time in 2023, when China, in the waning days of its Covid-19 restrictions, blocked deliveries from Ecuador. Without access to China, Ecuador moved far more of its catch to the US instead, sending prices crashing. Suddenly, every freezer in the Gulf was full, Zirlott recalls, and he was forced to sell pallet after pallet of shrimp from his warehouse for “cheaper prices than I had ever heard of,” losing about $900 a pop. By the time China was accepting Ecuador’s shrimp again the following winter, he’d lost about $90,000 on the catch he’d had to sell in the meantime.

Zirlott, who sells $5 million to $7 million worth of shrimp a year, says he had little choice but to eat those losses. He was running out of cash and needed whatever he could scrape together to keep his three boats running in the short term. “All my capital was tied up in shrimp,” he says. “I couldn’t keep buying fuel and paying the crews.” Similarly, the Gulf Coast processing plants that shrimpers sell to say there isn’t much they can do to negotiate prices imposed by the far larger global supply. “We get pulled around by import prices,” says Kristen Baumer, the fourth-generation co-owner of Paul Piazza & Son Inc., a domestic shrimp processor in New Orleans. “We’re like the tail.”

Fresh Gulf shrimp at Z-Packed Inc., a wholesaler owned by shrimper Jeremy Zirlott.

Lest you think their counterparts in Southeast Asia or Latin America are diving into Scrooge McDuck-style money banks, they’re not. In Ecuador, worker advocates have been campaigning for a monthly wage floor of about $500. Shrimp peelers throughout the Gulf make $14 to $21 an hour; in Indonesia, it’s more like $3.75 a day. “Shrimp farming is like gambling — sometimes you profit, sometimes you lose,” says Walisan, a shrimp farmer in Kebumen Regency, a town about six hours southeast of Jakarta by train. (Like many people in the region, he goes by one name.) Sakinah, a shrimp peeler who spent eight years working at the contaminated BMS plant in Cikande, made about $55 a week there before she was laid off last year. As a contract worker, there was no safety net waiting for her on the other side of the pink slip. “The company did not pay me anything,” she says. “We need justice.” Sakinah worries that her two sons are at risk of radiation poisoning because of her work, and the government donations of rice and eggs that followed her job loss quickly ran out.

The Indonesian government, which is developing state-owned “shrimp estates” to boost the nation’s production, described last year’s recalls as isolated incidents. The government’s investigation determined that the shrimp supply was affected by a drift of airborne contaminants from a nearby smelting facility owned by PT Peter Metal Technology, a scrap metal company. Indonesian authorities sentenced the company’s director to three years in prison, along with fines for generating toxic waste. “It is the first time we ever faced this — maybe in the world,” says Ishartini, director general of Indonesia’s seafood safety agency. She described the incident as “very shocking to our shrimp industry.” Peter Metal couldn’t be reached for comment.

Working closely with the US FDA, Indonesia also imposed an extra certification process on its shrimp exports from Cikande’s home island of Java, requiring all products to be scanned and tested in a lab before leaving the country. Gigantic truck scanners were still in use months later when Businessweek visited Cikande.

Shrimp’s industrial revolution has come with other downsides for those living near the means of production. Across Asia, shrimp aquaculture is the primary cause of mangrove loss, as the biodiverse wetlands known for protecting the region from the effects of storms and tsunamis are dynamited and replaced with the telltale black plastic sheeting of an industrial pond. In Indonesia, studies have linked industrial shrimp farming to the depletion, salination and toxification of the local drinking water and marine ecosystems. Among the natural wonders at risk nearby are the Kebumen National Geopark (a Unesco World Heritage site) and a vulnerable population of sea turtles. In other words, America’s endless appetite for shrimp isn’t just a free-trade success story, says Daniel Frits Maurits Tangkilisan, an activist who was arrested in 2023 for protesting the industry’s expansion on the Karimunjawa Archipelago, known for its pristine corals and another national park. “It means the suffering of us, of our ecosystem, our environment.”

That’s all the more reason, US suppliers say, to think globally and shrimp locally. Over the past few years, federal and state officials have taken some steps to emphasize the provenance of shrimp from the Gulf. President Joe Biden’s Federal Trade Commission warned several major seafood chains not to use imagery falsely conveying that their farmed stocks were from the sea. A Louisiana law passed last year imposes stiff fines on restaurants and suppliers who fail to disclose to customers that their seafood is imported, and there are similar laws on the books in Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Texas. But absent strong interest from consumers, enforcement has been scattershot at best, and federal regulatory muscle isn’t what it was a couple of years ago. At the moment, the domestic shrimp industry is putting more of its faith in marketing.

In Westwego, Louisiana, just across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, vendors at the iconic Westwego Shrimp Lot are grudgingly following the letter of the state law, with small signs disclaiming that they’re selling foreign stocks. (Only a few stands proudly declare that their catch comes exclusively from the Gulf.) In nearby grocery stores, things get more confusing; some foreign suppliers have been known to slap American flags on their packaging to give customers the wrong idea. That’s one reason industry trade groups have expressed excitement about the “rapid shrimp tests” developed by Prashant Singh, a food safety microbiologist at Florida State University, in 2023.

Vannamei shrimp raised in farms overseas are a different species from those in the Gulf, so DNA tests can suss out a wild Gulf crustacean in about two hours, with a little more effort than a home pregnancy test, says Singh. Drop a small bit of the shrimp in the test kit (gingerly if you can, with a toothpick) and the results will become clear as liquid travels down the test strip, like a Covid test. Singh says the tough part in development was creating something cheap, portable, and versatile enough to be useful on the Gulf’s seafood festival circuit. “They will be selling grilled shrimp fried with different coating, different batter, different salt,” says Singh. “You need to come up with a testing DNA extraction process which can handle all of it.” Domestic trade groups now regularly publish supposed “fraud rates” of regions, restaurants and festivals to shame people for using foreign shrimp.

Dominick’s Seafood, in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, sells Gulf-branded shrimp and is one of the largest processors on the Gulf Coast.

US trade groups aren’t shy about bringing up the BMS recalls either, but absent some fresh public-health crisis, they’ve tried to stoke more abstract fears. Some shrimp stocks from overseas have been shown to regularly overuse antibiotics, which heightens the risks of inadvertently creating new medication-resistant superbugs. (It’s for that reason that EU border authorities now test 50% of the bloc’s shrimp imports from India.) But for the US industry to sell domestic customers on the idea of shrimp as a delicacy, it may be less important to flog the idea that foreign shrimp is so much scarier than it is to show why the local catch is so much tastier. Zirlott says his shrimp don’t need seasoning, and he’s quick with the tasting notes: royal reds are sweet and lobsterlike; Key West pinks taste of lime; white shrimp are mild, if that’s your thing. Zirlott recommends brown shrimp for their more medicinal taste, like iodine.

In lieu of selling via traditional channels like Westwego, a growing swath of the area’s lifers are thinking more about how to pitch their shrimp directly to restaurateurs and even individual diners. Baumer, the shrimp processor in New Orleans, distributes to grocery retailers and restaurant vendors in nearly every state and likes to compare wild-caught domestic shrimp to wagyu beef. Zirlott says the lesson he learned from Ecuador flooding the market a few years ago was not to let surplus shrimp pile up. In addition to his deals with wholesale distribution companies, he now sells roughly 25% of his inventory to a group of about 40 vendors throughout the Gulf states. “I am not really targeting the grocery chain that needs a mass-processed shrimp,” he says. “I am targeting a niche restaurant or market that can appreciate the quality of the product I put out.”

There’s some evidence that this model can scale up. Dominick Ficarino, who’s been catching shrimp since 1970 and was featured on a short-lived reality show called Big Shrimpin’ in the early 2010s, has spent decades negotiating with retailers, investing in vertical integration and expanding his fleet. The fourth-generation shrimper now runs nine boats out of Bayou La Batre and operates one of the largest processors on the Gulf Coast, with as many as 90 workers at his packing plant supplying major grocery chains with his Gulf-branded shrimp. But even in the seafood capital that Forrest Gump made famous, Ficarino says he’s under no illusions that he’s safe from the domestic industry declines that have put a steady stream of both friends and rivals out of business. Bayou La Batre’s tax base is down about 40% since 2020.

Ficarino estimates that he lost about $2 million across his boats in 2024, as fuel prices shot up and shrimp prices stayed low. “You think the stock market’s going to make me nervous?” he jokes, adding that he’s “lost a million dollars in a weekend in a freezer.” He says he reinvested any tariff-related windfall into repairing his boats. “I want the industry to stay alive,” he says. “I want to see somebody that’s got the heart to grow it.”

Leann Bosarge and her father Steve are directors of the Southern Shrimp Alliance, an industry trade group working to keep wild-caught Gulf shrimp competitive with cheap, farmed imports.

To command top dollar at high-end restaurants and grocers across the US, shrimpers will need to make their shrimp read as “fancy,” or at least “real” in the way that influencers use the word. Inside the deep freezers at Southbound, a casual seafood restaurant a little ways outside Bayou La Batre, bags of shrimp are Sharpie’d with the name of the boat captain who sold them, the date they were caught and whether they’re PDV (peeled and deveined). Lance Nacio, a third-generation shrimper in Louisiana, has hired a staff of peelers and deveiners to do his own processing behind his bayou dock, enabling him to sell about 75% of his product directly to consumers online and at farmers markets. He says it’s a selling point that he doesn’t use sodium tripolyphosphate, a processing chemical that he says can make shrimp “real rubbery and chewy.”

None of this guarantees success. Down the coast from Ficarino is fourth-generation shrimper Leann Bosarge, who says she and her dad, Steve, have cut costs “any way we can” to keep their fleet of six boats in Pascagoula, Mississippi, afloat. That includes using lighter nets to save on fuel and tagging turtles for the government for extra cash. Expenses forced them to idle their boats for most of this year. “Even though you’re catching more shrimp, you’re working harder, you’re making less money per person,” Steve Bosarge says. Both Bosarges are directors of the Southern Shrimp Alliance, an industry trade group, and Leann says they’re fighting for their family’s future. “I hope that we can get the fishery to the point where I can encourage my children to go into it,” she says.

Separated by 7,000 miles and an ocean or two, shrimpers in Indonesia and America are competitors in this global market. But they’re united in their increasingly difficult struggle to make a sustainable living, even as the industry’s size continues to grow. Everywhere, daily costs fluctuate based on decisions made in distant boardrooms. Heidi Guerra, also known as Bayou_Girl2 on TikTok, where she livestreams sunsets from her shrimp boat, says she got through one tough season by selling her shrimp on the highway. It’s a memory that brings her to tears during an interview.

At first, many a revolutionary business idea sounds nuts, so cut Frank Asche a little slack when he says it’s time to rethink the po’boy. One of the things most people know about the iconic Creole sandwich is that the filling is fried to hell and back. Asche, a natural resource economist at the University of Florida who studies seafood trends, says there are ways for a shrimp po’boy to seem a lot classier and therefore command a much higher price. One idea, he suggests, is to serve the sandwich with shrimp that’s raw except for a bit of olive oil, a common way to enjoy shrimp in Italy. There are other success stories along these lines in the seafood business, he notes, such as the market expansion of Gulf red snapper and Pacific halibut, now prized among America’s foodies for their refined taste.

Of course, that’s missing the point of a sandwich that’s literally named po’boy. Even Asche is quick to say that this kind of strategy isn’t meant for the mainstream. If you want to supply your haul to some fast-casual chain with thousands of US locations, he says, “they don’t care about the product being American. They care about the price.” That theory seems to stand up at a sampling of grocery stores around the Gulf, from holes-in-the-wall to Whole Foods. Shoppers and staffers alike say that the price tags are what matter, not the country-of-origin labels. One shopper at the Westwego Shrimp Lot, when asked why he drove 45 minutes from Baton Rouge to buy seafood for his gumbo, says it was to save money.

Additional reporting by Abdus Somad