The Global Shrimp Council (GSC) said its first year of promoting shrimp as “the happy protein” on social media was surprisingly successful in 2025, and it hopes to continue its momentum in 2026 with pop-up, in-person events.
“We’re going to keep on going with the marketing effort because before [2025], we had zero community effort toward shrimp. Now, we have something to show,” GSC Co-Founder Gabriel Luna said at the Global Seafood Market Conference in Hollywood, Florida, U.S.A., on 20 January.
Formed in 2023, the council is a producer-led promotional body created to concentrate marketing efforts around shrimp and create a global campaign to encourage more shrimp consumption. According to Luna, the value of GSC is its ability to aggregate funding from individual producers and seafood companies that it can then spend on large marketing campaigns.
“Last year, we spent USD 680,000 [EUR 580,117] on shrimp advertising. If I had to spend that out of my pocket, I’d be broke,” Luna said. “But, because we all joined together, we were able to come up with such a sum and actually get this off the ground. We have developed branding, and we have developed imaging, color palettes.”
The body launched its first campaign, led by advertising firm Hopscotch, at the 2025 Seafood Expo North America (SENA) in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A., designating shrimp as “the happy protein.” That campaign was initially supposed to focus solely on the U.S. market, but members pushed for a wider global reach and the council quickly expanded its efforts to include Spain and France.
The council used social media to promote shrimp as a tasty, convenient, versatile, and nutritious protein that is fun to prepare and consume. The campaign featured partnerships with influencers like Chef K – who works with the celebrity Kardashian family – a shrimp Labubu contest, and a wide variety of videos on social media.
“We partnered with extraordinary creators from all three markets whose recipes and moments made the campaign sing with joy,” a promotional video shared by GSC played at GSMC stated. “We published more than 266 posts on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Linkedin that got a 2.64 engagement rate and generated over 48 million impressions, with over 13 million in the U.S., over 29 million in France, and over 5 million in Spain. Influencers generated another 6.8 million impressions.”
Luna noted that the global shrimp industry was handed a boon when the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently unveiled its new nutritional guidelines, which raised the profile of protein, including shrimp. The department’s new food pyramid includes an image of shrimp among the protein, dairy, and healthy fats U.S. Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants Americans to consume more of.
“We’re not taking credit for that; shrimp did that by itself,” Luna said. “But we are here and we made it, so we have to take advantage.”
With positive momentum behind its campaign and a bevy of new members, the council wants to expand its efforts in 2026 with in-person events that can keep driving social media engagement.
“Our focus for 2026 is to try and reinvent seafood shopper marketing. We want to make a retail touchpoint, and Hopscotch came up with this idea of consumer engagement with a food truck,” Luna said. “The idea is to go to retailers and offer the Global Shrimp Council to put something similar to a food truck – maybe it’s a grill, maybe it’s something outside where we’re cooking up shrimp – and giving shrimp to consumers before they walk in and reminding them, ‘Hey, this is how we cook it […] this is how good it tastes!”
Luna said the food truck idea was presented to the council’s board in January, and one company has already stepped forward and expressed interest. He noted that while the idea will likely be piloted in the U.S., he hopes it can be expanded so that any member can utilize it in their home country. The pop-up events will be used to generate social media comment that can then further spread the council’s “happy protein” message to consumers.
“The idea is to hire influencers to come in to do the walkthrough, get some shrimp outside of the retail store, go into the retail store, grab some shrimp, take it home, and then continue cooking it at home,” Luna explained. “Now, we have a story behind the [concept that] eating shrimp is healthy, but this is the way we’re showing it to people, showing the consumer how to eat it more often.”
