An Alabama state legislator is pushing to strengthen the state’s seafood labeling law, adding penalties, DNA testing, and other changes to improve compliance.
Alabama passed its seafood labeling law in 2024, which required establishments to designate whether the seafood they serve is wild-caught or farmed and to display its country of origin. However, lawmakers are already looking to make several improvements to the law, and State Representative Chip Brown (R-Hollinger's Island) has introduced House Bill 444 to implement them.
“We've had that out there for over a year now, and we've found the little problems and loopholes that exist in almost every piece of legislation,” Brown said during a 18 February Alabama House Committee on Health hearing in his bill. “This is an effort to address those and make it more accountable for the restaurants and allow people to actually know what's going on in the restaurants. So, what we're doing here is we're making a few changes.”
One challenge is simply compliance, Brown said, with many restaurants and vendors still refusing to follow the seafood labeling law.
“We've also we've had a problem with it being enforced and restaurants just ignoring it. I was in a restaurant Friday night – went in there to a nice restaurant, looked down, and it had probably 15 seafood items on there in Mobile, the seafood capital of Alabama, […] and not one of the items was labeled. So to me, that's a trust issue – that we should be able to trust our restaurants that they're serving us is what they say they're serving us,” Brown said.
Brown’s bill would help incentivize businesses to comply with the law by including the seafood labeling requirements in state health inspections, with the lawmaker stating that existing fines were not incentive enough. The proposal would also authorize DNA testing, allowing state officials to test whether the seafood being served is of foreign or domestic origin.
“We're allowing the Department of Agriculture to come in and do random testing. The Department of Agriculture contracts with a testing firm that has every DNA line of every shrimp in the world, so they can come in and tell you if you say you're serving fresh Gulf shrimp or fresh Mobile Bay shrimp if it really is or if it's caught off the coast of South America or Asia or wherever,” Brown said. “Also, they are very close to perfecting oysters, so if you say you have Apalachicola oysters but they're really from, you know, Maine or somewhere, they can tell you.”
The bill would also create a quarterly register highlighting restaurants that failed DNA testing, Brown said.
Brown’s bill would also authorize restaurants to include inserts in their menu disclosing the presence of imported seafood instead of having to reprint the menu every time their sourcing changes.
“Hopefully with that, we'll be able to actually have not only enforcement but people actually following the law,” Brown said.
The Alabama House Health Committee approved the legislation, advancing it for full consideration by the Alabama House.
