DNA barcoding of more than 1,400 Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) labelled products showed less than 1 percent were mislabelled, compared with a reported average global seafood mislabelling rate of 30 percent.
These results were published in the journal Current Biology and suggest that the MSC’s ecolabelling and Chain of Custody program is an effective deterrent for systematic and deliberate species substitution and fraud, said the organization.
DNA methods have been widely used to detect species mislabelling and a recent meta-analysis of 4,500 seafood product tests from 51 peer-reviewed publications found an average of 30 percent were not the species stated on the label or menu.
