Seafood distributors in the US

Country of origin labeling for fish is older than country of origin labeling for anything else. USDA's own account puts the fish and shellfish regulations in force in 2005 and the final rule covering all other commodities in 2009, four years later.

What it requires of a distributor is specific. Under 7 CFR 60.400, anyone "engaged in the business of supplying a covered commodity to a retailer, whether directly or indirectly" must make the country of origin and the method of production, wild or farm-raised, available to the buyer, and must hold records substantiating that claim for a year from the transaction. A second clause requires the same people to keep records identifying the immediate previous source and the immediate subsequent recipient, again for a year.

Then comes the exemption that decides what reaches a menu. Section 60.200(b) exempts food service establishments from labeling, and section 60.107 defines one as "a restaurant, cafeteria, lunch room, food stand, saloon, tavern, bar, lounge, or other similar facility".

So the federal answer to "where is this from and was it farmed" is that your supplier already has to be able to tell you, and has to have a year of paper behind the answer, but only because it also sells to grocery, and nothing in the federal rule requires you to pass any of it on to a diner. That gap is exactly what the state laws below were written to close.

It also means the question is cheap to ask. A supplier that cannot answer it either does not sell to retail at all or is not keeping the records the rule requires, and either way you have learned something in one phone call.

Since 2019 a run of states has put a shrimp or seafood origin duty into their own law, and they have not all put it on the same party. Five are verified from a statute or a state agency page here: Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Georgia.

Texas SB 823 is the one that matters most to a distributor, because it names one. Its operative sentence reads that "a food service supplier, wholesaler, distributor, or wholesale distributor may not sell shrimp in this state unless the shrimp's label includes a clear and conspicuous notice stating whether the shrimp is imported". It took effect on 1 September 2025, passed the Senate 28 to 3 and the House 128 to 13, and carries an administrative penalty against a license or permit with a good-faith defense.

The detail worth noticing is how it defines its terms. Shrimp is imported if it "does not satisfy the United States country of origin requirements" established by 7 CFR 60.128. A state law reached into the federal rule, borrowed its definition, and attached it to the party the federal rule deliberately left out. It also bars a restaurant from calling imported shrimp Texas, American, Domestic or Gulf shrimp.

Georgia HB 117 works from the other end: the duty falls on the restaurant rather than the supplier, and it takes effect from July 2026. Mississippi's marine resources department describes its own law as requiring suppliers, restaurants and retailers to mark domestic or imported on labels, menus and advertising, keep origin records and face penalties, with all grocery stores, markets, restaurants and food trucks in scope from 1 July 2026. Louisiana's Act 372 was signed on 19 June 2019 and enforced from that September, and puts a notice on the menu or at the door of any food service establishment serving imported shrimp or crawfish.

57 of the 122 suppliers listed on this page sit in a state whose law we have read and captured, and 65 do not, which is why the list above names the act on the rows where one applies. That split is the whole reason for a national page: the federal layer is identical in all 7 metros and the state layer is not.

One caution about counting. A trade body lists eight states with a labeling law, and three of those, Florida, North Carolina and South Carolina, are not verified here from a statute. Five is what this page can stand behind.

Almost every fish in the United States is regulated by FDA. Catfish is not. Through the 2008 and 2014 Farm Bills, fish of the order Siluriformes were made amenable to the Federal Meat Inspection Act, and USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service inspects them under the same statute it uses for beef and pork.

The handover has dates. FDA's own constituent update puts the transfer of primary inspection responsibility at 1 March 2016 for domestic producers and 15 April 2016 for importers. So a catfish fillet crossing the border is inspected by the agency that inspects cattle, and a tilapia fillet beside it is not.

That is not a curiosity for a buyer, because it changes what an enforcement action looks like. One of the companies listed on this site recalled roughly 69,590 pounds of Siluriformes products that had not been presented for import reinspection, frozen fish imported from Vietnam and sold under a species name that turned out to be in the catfish order. The recall happened under meat law, for a fish.

The practical version: if you buy anything in the catfish family, including the imported species sold as swai, basa, pangasius or walking fish, ask your supplier who inspected it. The answer should be FSIS, and an establishment number goes with it.

NOAA Fisheries is careful with its own wording and this page will be too: "We estimate that 80 percent of the seafood Americans ate that year came from foreign imports", for 2023, alongside 6.3 billion pounds of edible seafood imported and 2.5 billion exported. USDA's Economic Research Service put it at more than 79 percent for 2020 and valued 2023 imports at $25.5 billion against a $20.3 billion trade deficit. Two agencies, two years, two numbers, and both are estimates rather than counts.

Underneath that sits the Seafood Import Monitoring Program, which NOAA describes as "a risk-based traceability program" requiring importers to report key data from the point of harvest to entry into US commerce on more than 1,100 species, covering "nearly half of all U.S seafood imports".

Thirteen species groups are in it, and the list reads like most of a menu: abalone, Atlantic cod, Atlantic blue crab, dolphinfish, grouper, red king crab, Pacific cod, red snapper, sea cucumber, sharks, shrimp, swordfish and tuna. Reporting began on 1 January 2018 for eleven of them and on 31 December 2018 for shrimp and abalone.

The part an operator can act on is who holds the data. It is collected from the importer of record, so a distributor that imports directly can usually tell you where a lot was harvested, and one that buys from an importer may genuinely not be able to. That is a question about the company's position in the chain rather than about its honesty, and it is worth asking in those terms.

Supplier type is not evenly spread across these 7 metros, and the pattern is geographic. Local specialists run a little over half the rows in the coastal and lakeside metros, and fall to roughly a third in Atlanta and Dallas, where national broadlines rise to nearly a fifth and to nearly a third. The two metros furthest from a working waterfront are the two where a national name is most often the answer.

That matters because national names repeat. Four of Atlanta's twenty-two rows belong to two owners: Sysco Atlanta and Buckhead Meat and Seafood of Atlanta both sit under Sysco, whose specialty arm's own site footer reads "A division of Sysco Corporation", and Halperns' Atlanta and Gordon Food Service both sit under Gordon Food Service, which announced the Halperns' acquisition itself. In Dallas the two specialty protein names a buyer would naturally shortlist against each other are those same two parents.

Pacific Seafood is the clearest case of a different shape, and it holds rows in three of our metros. In its own words it is "family-owned and operated under our third-generation CEO", works from more than 40 facilities, and participates "in all parts of the supply chain from harvesting/fishing to processing and distribution". One company, from the boat to your door, listed three times in this directory under three metros.

The map also moves. Fortune Fish and Gourmet announced in June 2026 that it had completed the acquisition of Inland Foods' Houston and New Orleans operating divisions, effective that month. We list an Inland row and a Fortune row separately, on separate pages, because that is how each company presented itself when its page was researched. A national view is the only place that kind of change is visible at all.

None of this is a reason to avoid any of these companies. It is a reason to check, because the standing advice in this trade, which this directory gives too, is to keep a second account so your pricing stays honest, and a second account only does that job if it answers to somebody else.

Everything above is law. This part is our own dataset, counted when you loaded the page, and it describes what these companies publish rather than what the trade looks like.

104 of the 122 say they deliver and 16 say they will ship beyond their own metro, which on a page with no city is the directly useful subset: those are the rows a kitchen outside these 7 metros can actually buy from today. 30 run a counter you can walk into.

The contact gap is the one that decides how you place an order. 55 of the 122 publish an email address and 67 do not, so for more than half of this list the order goes by phone whether that suits your evening or not. 105 publish a street address and 12 publish no phone number at all.

63 publish a founding year, the oldest of them 1897. Roughly half this list will tell you how long it has been trading and roughly half will not, which is worth knowing before you read an age claim anywhere as a sign of anything.

None of this is national coverage and the page should say so plainly: 7 metros in a country with fifty states. These are the seafood suppliers we have verified from their own published sources, not the ones that exist.