Anna Marie Seafood

Americans’ favorite seafood is shrimp, with each citizen consuming an average of 4.5 pounds per year. About 90% is supplied from mechanized ponds in places like Thailand, China, Ecuador, and Vietnam. U.S. shrimpers, most based in Louisiana, have found it increasingly difficult to compete against foreign “farms” on price and instead have decided to focus on quality.

A flurry of recent studies has raised serious concerns about foreign shrimp farms. The United Kingdom’s Environmental Justice Foundation reports that high-density Asian shrimp farms often use antibiotics and have high levels of disease, while other reports indicate frequent use of child labor in these same regions. A shockingly high percentage of tested imported shrimp has unacceptable levels of chemical contamination—and less than 1% of imported shrimp is being tested. Environmental concerns about shrimp farming date back over a decade, when the journal Science published a damning report on the ecological destruction caused by shrimp farms around the globe.

These stories have armed American shrimpers with several strategies for winning back domestic consumers. They successfully lobbied for tariffs against unfair foreign competition, though that approach ultimately has limited appeal because American consumers generally like low prices and free markets. They argued that U.S. shrimp are more healthful, a position recently strengthened when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned shrimp from China amidst a flurry of contamination-related bans on Chinese products. But until large numbers of Americans get sick from foreign shrimp, that’s not very persuasive. The one argument that’s a clear winner is taste. Imported, farmed shrimp simply doesn’t have the same great seafood flavor and salty richness of wild shrimp. Walmart and Target now sell a product called “certified wild American shrimp,” framing a strategy that could help all U.S. producers.

Unfortunately, not all American producers have been consistently mindful of quality. In the year 2000, according to Lance, when disease outbreaks at foreign aquaculture farms raised global prices, some domestic processors “put a bad name on wild caught shrimp. They were getting such a high price they started doing things that weren’t ethical or right. Greed set in. For example, they added chemicals to the shrimp to increase moisture content, even though this left the shrimp tasting gummy.”

Lance was committed to doing better. As the sole owner of Anna Marie Seafood, an LLC incorporated in Louisiana in 2004, he typically works with two crew members at a time, though the personnel are constantly changing. “It’s a depressed industry, all the better hands have moved on to ‘real jobs.’”

The company is selling about 100,000 pounds of shrimp per year, yielding about $500 million in revenue. Sales and revenues have doubled every year for the past three years, but costs have grown even faster. Lance worries that there are “tons and tons of expenses with refrigeration on board.”

Helping to make ends meet has been a revolving line of credit for working capital through the New York-based nonprofit SeedCo: $200,000 at 6% interest. He also has received $25,000 in marketing assistance—a Go Fish grant—from the White Boot Brigade that originated from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation.

To grow his business, Lance wants to focus once again on technological improvement. He is working with Louisiana State University (LSU) on two of their studies. One is empirically testing his assertion that onboard freezing locks in quality. Says Lance, “The lady who is doing the study says you can’t see a difference in frozen [shrimp] after one month or six. We’ll have paperwork to back up what we’re telling our customers.” The study is also identifying other improvements in the freezing technology that Lance stands ready to deploy.

The second LSU study is on the efficacy of using stationary shrimp traps rather than nets, an approach being prototyped in Washington state. Lance has noticed that the prized white shrimp are thriving on his marsh lands. Where the water is only three feet deep, nets are impossible to drag because of silt and logs. But stationary pots could do the trick. If preliminary tests are successful, Lance intends to challenge the ban on such pots currently enforced by the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. “If you could target just one species instead of pulling nets in the water, you’d virtually eliminate bycatch.”