SEAFOOD RESEARCH SERIES | PAPER NO. 5
Brand Search in Practice: A Seven-Distributor Pilot of the Seafood Label Model
Paper No. 4 set out a confidence-graded brand-search model for FDA-regulated seafood. This paper applies that model to public brand catalogs from seven major U.S. foodservice distributors. Across 26 distributor-advertised seafood brands, eight produced a reliable bridge to a public FDA enforcement record, and the most consequential bridge ran from a brand on a US Foods storefront to an active 2025 import alert tied to cesium-137 contamination.1,2,3
Prepared for publication by Farm Animal Transparency with the assistance of AI | April 23, 2026
| “The model performs as designed on shared and third-party brands. The open problem is the distributor house brand, where FDA public records rarely surface the label name.” |
At a glance
| • Pilot examined 26 distributor seafood brands across Sysco, US Foods, Performance Foodservice, Gordon Food Service, Shamrock Foods, Ben E. Keith, and Cheney Brothers. |
| • Eight brand-to-FDA bridges were identified with High or Medium confidence; 18 distributor-exclusive brands produced no reliable bridge. |
| • Flagship Tier-1/Tier-2 chain: Aqua Star shrimp (US Foods CHEF’STORE) → multiple 2025 FDA recalls → PT. Bahari Makmur Sejati on Import Alerts 99-51 and 99-52 for cesium-137 contamination. |
| • The ~69% null-bridge rate concentrates on distributor-exclusive house brands, confirming a structural coverage gap the methodology anticipated. |
Executive Summary
Paper No. 4 described a three-tier matching logic — direct identifier, responsible-company match, probable brand association — and argued that a brand-search model has real value only if attribution language adapts to evidence strength. This paper tests that logic against real distributor catalogs. The model works where the underlying records name a brand: eight brands produced reliable bridges to FDA recalls, warning letters, or import alerts, and the most prominent chain — Aqua Star to PT. Bahari Makmur Sejati to Import Alerts 99-51 and 99-52 — is a textbook Tier-1/Tier-2 case anchored in the 2025 cesium-137 shrimp event. The model fails, as predicted, on distributor-exclusive house labels: 18 of 26 brands generated no public bridge, confirming that a package-label or UPC capture layer is needed to reach that segment.1,2,3,4
Method
Brand inventories were pulled from the official public catalogs of seven distributors: Sysco Foodie and Sysco Shop, the US Foods brand page and CHEF’STORE storefront, Performance Foodservice brand pages, Gordon Food Service’s GFS Store and Gordon Restaurant Market, Shamrock Foods’ family-brands listings, Ben E. Keith’s products pages, and Cheney Brothers’ exclusive-brands page. Only seafood brands were retained. Each brand was classified as distributor-exclusive/private label, family/exclusive brand, or third-party brand.
Each brand was then tested against public FDA records — the openFDA food-enforcement dataset, FDA warning letters, FDA import alerts, and FDA safety advisories — for the 2020 through 2025 window. A bridge was logged only when (a) the brand was explicitly named in an official FDA page, or (b) a named responsible company on the brand’s public record also appeared in an FDA enforcement record. Bridges were graded High (brand explicitly named on an official FDA page) or Medium (same firm tied to the brand later appears on an import alert, with a clear historical but not necessarily current tie). Weaker associations were deliberately not logged.5,6,7
Results Overview
Of 26 brands examined, eight produced a reliable bridge and 18 did not. Three distributors accounted for every bridge: US Foods (Aqua Star, Harbor Banks, and Orca Bay), Gordon Food Service (Chicken of the Sea), and Ben E. Keith (Trident Seafoods). Sysco, Performance Foodservice, Shamrock Foods, and Cheney Brothers produced no bridges in the pilot — not because their brands are cleaner, but because their seafood assortments are dominated by distributor-exclusive private-label lines that FDA’s public records generally do not reach.
Case Study 1 — Cesium-137 Shrimp: Aqua Star and PT. Bahari Makmur Sejati
Aqua Star appears on the US Foods CHEF’STORE storefront as a third-party brand. Between August and October 2025, FDA issued a series of official recall notices and a public advisory naming Aqua Star products in a cesium-137 contamination event. The recall text and the FDA advisory together identified PT. Bahari Makmur Sejati, an Indonesian processor, as the upstream firm; the same firm was added to Import Alert 99-51 on August 14, 2025, and to Import Alert 99-52 on October 3, 2025. A supplemental import-refusal record attributes 434 total refusals to this firm as of December 17, 2025, with violation codes that include 2420 RADIONUC.2,3,4,5
Under Paper No. 4’s model, this chain fires at two tiers simultaneously. Tier 1 (direct match) fires because Aqua Star is explicitly named on the FDA recall pages — the label text is the same identifier as the one in the record. Tier 2 (responsible-company match) fires because the FDA advisory names Aqua Star recalls and adds PT. Bahari Makmur Sejati to a new import alert, producing a brand-to-foreign-processor bridge. A scanner-side match on an Aqua Star package during this window should surface the recall, the advisory, and the import-alert status as a single narrative.1
Case Study 2 — Chicken of the Sea, Harbor Banks, and Avanti Frozen Foods
Gordon Food Service lists Chicken of the Sea in its GFS Store channel. US Foods markets Harbor Banks as a distributor-exclusive seafood brand. Both brands were named in 2021 FDA recall notices for frozen cooked shrimp distributed by Avanti Frozen Foods Pvt. Ltd. and linked to a Salmonella Weltevreden outbreak. Avanti later appeared on Import Alert 16-120 — fish and fishery products — on March 4, 2025.6,7
This is a Tier-1 brand-named recall plus a Tier-2 historical bridge. Two caveats apply. First, the 2021 recall ties Chicken of the Sea frozen cooked shrimp to Avanti; it does not identify the canned tuna SKUs currently sold through GFS. Second, the 2025 import-alert listing is evidence of an ongoing compliance issue at Avanti, not evidence of current Chicken of the Sea or Harbor Banks sourcing. The model should surface the records and carry the caveat — not infer current supply.
Case Study 3 — Brand-Owner Direct Matches: Orca Bay and Trident
Two remaining bridges are Tier-1 company matches. Orca Bay Foods, LLC issued a 2020 allergy-alert recall for battered cod with undeclared wheat and milk; Orca Bay is listed as a third-party brand on US Foods CHEF’STORE. Trident Seafoods Corporation issued a 2021 public-notice recall for Pacific Salmon Burgers; Trident is listed on Ben E. Keith product pages. Both match because the brand-owner company name equals the recalling firm on the FDA page. These are the cleanest class of matches and the ones the model will most reliably produce.8,9
The Null-Bridge Finding
Eighteen of 26 brands produced no reliable FDA bridge: every Portico tier (Classic, Imperial, Pride, Simply) at Sysco; Bay Winds, Empire’s Treasure, The Fresh Catch, and World Dock at Performance Foodservice; Costar, King & Prince, and Maripesca at Gordon Food Service; Pier 22 Seafood Co. and Pierport Seafood at Shamrock; Admiral of the Fleet and PubHouse at Ben E. Keith; Crazy Fish International at Cheney Brothers; plus Pacific Seafood on US Foods CHEF’STORE.
The concentration is not random. The distributors whose brands resist bridging are the ones whose seafood is sold under distributor-owned, house, or private-label brand names, and FDA’s brand-keyed recall dataset rarely names those packages directly. In FDA enforcement records for shrimp, cod, tilapia, and salmon, the recalling firm is usually a processor, an importer, or a national retail chain; the foodservice distributor’s private-label SKU sits one level downstream and does not appear as its own line item. The model’s Tier 3 — probable brand association via facets — exists for exactly this case, but closing it requires UPC or package-OCR data that public distributor catalogs do not carry.1,5
Implications for the FAT App
Three implications follow. First, Category 13 of the FAT seafood scoring framework (Enforcement & Compliance) should distinguish “no bridge found” from “no record” in user-facing copy. The absence of a public record is not equivalent to a clean record, and Paper No. 4’s attribution discipline requires that distinction to be explicit. Second, the Cs-137 chain is the live case the FAT App should surface immediately if an Aqua Star package is scanned; the data to do so — the recall URLs, the advisory URL, the import-alert pages — is already in the pilot output. Third, the house-brand gap is the next problem to solve, and the path forward is a package-label capture layer rather than additional catalog parsing.
Limitations
The pilot relied on public catalogs and public FDA records. It did not include back-label “Distributed by / Manufactured for” parsing, UPC lookups, or lot-code backfills — each of which would likely surface additional Tier-1 matches. The historical bridges (Avanti / Chicken of the Sea / Harbor Banks) are not evidence of current supply, and the model’s user-facing copy must reflect that. All counts are point-in-time as of April 23, 2026.
Conclusion
Applied to seven foodservice distributors, the confidence-graded brand-search model performs as designed on shared and third-party brands and is structurally limited on distributor house brands. Eight real bridges — led by the Aqua Star / cesium-137 chain — demonstrate that the model can deliver public-health-relevant links when a brand is actually named in FDA records. The null-bridge cluster on house brands is a finding about coverage, not a failure of logic, and points to the package-capture layer as the next engineering problem.
Endnotes
1. Farm Animal Transparency, “Scanning the Seafood Label: A Confidence-Graded Brand-Search Model,” Seafood Research Series Paper No. 4, April 21, 2026.
2. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, “FDA Advises Public Not to Eat, Sell, or Serve Certain Imported Frozen Shrimp from Indonesian Firm,” August 19, 2025.
3. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Import Alert 99-51 — Detention Without Physical Examination of Human Food Held Under Insanitary Conditions Resulting in Chemical Contamination; PT. Bahari Makmur Sejati date published August 14, 2025.
4. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Import Alert 99-52 — red-list entry for PT. Bahari Makmur Sejati frozen shrimp products due to cesium-137; date published October 3, 2025.
5. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, “2025 Recalls of Frozen Shrimp Products Associated With Cesium-137 Contamination — PT. Bahari Makmur Sejati.”
6. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, “Avanti Frozen Foods Recalls Frozen Cooked Shrimp Because of Possible Health Risk” (June 25, 2021) and subsequent expansion (August 13, 2021).
7. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Import Alert 16-120 — Detention Without Physical Examination of Fish and Fishery Products Due to Noncompliance With Seafood HACCP; Avanti Frozen Foods Private Limited listing.
8. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, “Orca Bay Foods, LLC Issues Allergy Alert on Undeclared Wheat and Milk Allergens in Gluten-Free Battered Cod,” October 23, 2020.
9. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, “Trident Seafoods Recalling Pacific Salmon Burger — Public Notice,” March 27, 2021.
10. Source data (internal): fat_distributor_seafood_brand_matrix_2026-04-23 and fat_brand_to_fda_links_2026-04-23 (Farm Animal Transparency pilot dataset, April 23, 2026); fda_seafood_enforcement_by_entity_2023_2025_expanded (April 21, 2026).
