Gombeer, S.,  Meganck, K.,  Van Bouronie, YR.,  Smitz, N.,  De Meyer, M. & Backeljau, T. 2017. ‘Authenticating fish and seafood products for sale on the Belgian market’. International Barcode of Life Conference. Book of abstracts, 60. 937.

Résumé de colloque

Background: Due to the international importance of fish and seafood trade there is a large potential for (un)intentional misidentification and/or deliberate fraud through species substitution. Several studies worldwide indicate that this is common practice, especially for processed products which lack characterizing morphological features (e.g. fillets). More stringent regulation on foodstuff labelling is supposed to enhance traceability, and protect consumers and the seafood industry from (un)intentional mislabeling. For Belgium, which has a higher per capita fish consumption than the EU average and a seafood import rate of 54% (42% of the total import comes from outside the EU), a study on samples collected from restaurants exposed a 32% incidence of fish mislabeling. In the present study we sampled fish and seafood at various supermarkets and fishmongers to evaluate the frequency of seafood mislabeling on the Belgian retail market including a broad range of taxa and processing methods (e.g. fresh, frozen, smoked, pickled, cooked, fried). Results: Due to the large range of taxa being analyzed several technical aspects concerning marker choice, primer selection, protocol optimization and interference as a result of food processing are being encountered, analyzed and improved. Preliminary identification results uncovered mislabeling of several samples, however, at this stage there does not yet appear to be a pattern towards specific taxa or treatments. Significance: Although past seafood fraud studies investigated different taxa, processing methods and purchase locations, they all seem to indicate that the scale as well as the product most prone to mislabeling differs by country. The present exploratory survey, including a broad taxonomic range of seafood species, therefore aims to identify those fish and seafood products (species & processing) most subjective to mislabeling in Belgium, while also further optimizing the identifications techniques.