TAMPA Fla. The state attorney general’s office has concluded its two-year investigation into the misrepresentation of fish as grouper by restaurants here, without saying what party had purposely mismarketed the seafood.
Seventeen restaurants were found to be selling less expensive species as grouper. Fourteen of them had been supplied by Sysco Food Services – West Coast Florida Inc., though parent Sysco Corp. said that house was not the restaurants’ only seafood supplier.
“There was no way of knowing if those products were Sysco products,” said Mark Palmer, vice president of communications for the parent corporation.
Neither Sysco nor Sysco West Coast acknowledged any wrongdoing, and they were not accused in a statement put out by Florida's attorney general Bill McCollum of purposely mislabeling less-expensive fish as grouper. But Sysco West Coast agreed to implement what Palmer described as more stringent testing methods for determining whether a fish is grouper or another species.
According to the attorney general’s office, Sysco West Coast is obliged to refrain from marketing any fish as grouper unless the company has taken “commercially reasonable steps” to verify its authenticity. In addition, Sysco West Coast has to withdraw from sale any fish that it believes has been mislabeled as grouper.
Sysco West Coast also agreed to donate $100,000 in food to local soup kitchens and to pay Florida $200,000 as a reimbursement for the investigation.
Palmer stressed that the distributor has not been accused of knowingly passing along less-expensive fish as grouper, but acknowledged that another species inadvertently could have been sold under that designation.
“It’s always a possibility with fish product testing right now,” he said. “When you have 10,000 cases, 60 pieces per case, yeah, you might have a snapper in there that was swimming with the groupers.”
The investigation began after a Tampa newspaper tested fish that was listed on restaurant menus as grouper, a local fish that had climbed in price because of limited supplies.