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✍️ Dirk Adams

⌛ 8 min read

FAT RESEARCH SERIES — SEAFOOD

SEAFOOD RESEARCH SERIES | PAPER NO. 6

Searching Seafood by Metro Area: A Public Relevance Layer for the FAT App

The FAT App can support seafood search by metro area, but the feature has to be designed honestly. The strongest public version is a layered search — FDA enforcement history, NOAA gateway inflows, Census seafood business infrastructure, and USDA ERS retail proxies. That produces metro relevance, not proof that a product reached a specific store shelf or neighborhood.^1,2,3,4

Prepared for publication by Farm Animal Transparency with the assistance of AI | June 18, 2026

At a glance

Executive Summary

Metro-area seafood search is feasible because the public record already contains the pieces needed to build it, even though no single federal dataset shows final city-by-city fish distribution. USDA ERS’s Food-at-Home Monthly Area Prices (F-MAP) offers comparable monthly food-purchase and price data for 10 metropolitan areas from 2012 through 2018. NOAA’s foreign fishery trade system provides monthly and annual seafood trade by product, country, and U.S. customs district, and NOAA says that “imports for consumption” reflect actual entry into U.S. consumption channels. Census County Business Patterns adds metro- and ZIP-level counts of seafood-related establishments. Together, those sources allow a metro-area seafood relevance layer even without firm-level or store-level shipment data.^1,2,3,4

The reason FAT needs these additional layers is that the FDA public record is real but incomplete. FDA says its Data Dashboard contains selected data elements, includes only final actions, and that the compliance dashboard covers only a subset of actions; actions involving foreign firms often take the form of import alerts not reported in that release. FDA also says the inspection-classification database is not comprehensive, and the OII FOIA Reading Room contains only select records, kept for five years before archiving. Recall coverage is stronger because FDA says all recalls it monitors are included in the Enforcement Report once classified.^5,6,7,8

The implication is straightforward. An app that relies only on FDA documents stays useful for watchdog work but limited for ordinary users. An app that combines the FDA record with metro context can tell users not only whether FDA has publicly acted, but how relevant a product lane is to their market, whether their metro is a direct seafood gateway, and whether the public evidence is direct, indirect, or absent.

The Problem FAT Is Solving

Seafood is unusually hard to make legible to consumers. NOAA estimates that 80 percent of the seafood Americans ate in 2023 came from foreign imports, moving through international supply chains, importers, brokers, cold storage, and distribution before reaching a restaurant or retail counter. Yet the public enforcement record is usually organized by regulated firm, not by consumer-facing brand, neighborhood, or metropolitan area.⁹

That creates a gap between what the government tracks and what users want to know. A user is not usually asking whether an FEI or import-alert number appeared in a federal record. The user is asking whether seafood is relevant to their market, whether an importer or product lane is part of a visible pattern, and whether that kind of product moves heavily through their city. Those are geographic questions as much as regulatory ones.

Can FAT Search Seafood by Metro Area?

Yes, in two different ways. The strongest apples-to-apples public build uses ERS F-MAP, which already standardizes monthly food-at-home purchase and price information for 10 metros: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and Philadelphia. ERS says the product covers 15 geographic areas in total — national, four Census regions, and those 10 metros — with monthly data for 2012–18 across 90 food-at-home categories. That makes F-MAP the best public foundation for a metro seafood search that compares large urban markets on the same terms.¹

The broader build uses Census geography. Census says County Business Patterns is available at the metropolitan, county, and ZIP-code levels, and that CBP APIs expose metropolitan/micropolitan statistical-area data by detailed industry. That lets FAT move beyond the 10 F-MAP metros and build a much wider seafood-infrastructure layer using establishment counts for seafood wholesalers, seafood processors, frozen-food wholesalers, and fish markets. The first search is stronger for direct metro-to-metro comparison; the second is stronger for scale and geography.^4,10

The Context Layers

The added information is not one extra dataset. It is a stack of context layers that correct for the blind spots in FDA’s public record.

ERS is explicit that store-level retail scanner data from Circana and store-location data from NielsenIQ TDLinx exist and can support research at the store-location or market-area level, but that access is restricted to USDA-sponsored projects and secure arrangements. City- and store-level seafood mapping is therefore possible in principle, but not yet reproducible from open federal sources alone.¹¹

Why the Metro Layer Makes the App Better

The metro layer turns search into a relevance tool. Without geography, FAT can only say that an FDA action exists or does not. With a metro layer, FAT can rank which users are most likely to care: a seafood importer tied to a foreign shrimp lane matters differently in Miami, Houston, Los Angeles, or New York than in a smaller inland market, and NOAA’s customs-district trade data are what make that ranking possible. The layer also adds context where FDA data are sparse — the dashboards are selective, the inspection database is not comprehensive, and the OII Reading Room is selective — so metro context gives users additional clues even when the enforcement trail is thin. It helps distinguish one-off events from structurally important lanes, and it meets users closer to the way seafood is actually bought: by city, restaurant market, distributor, or brand.^2,3,5,6,7

What a Metro-Area Search Page Should Look Like

A user-facing metro page could be structured in five blocks. (1) Metro profile — whether the metro is one of the 10 comparable ERS metros, whether it maps to a customs district, and whether it is a high-, medium-, or lower-density seafood business market. (2) Product lanes — the metro’s most relevant seafood categories using retail-proxy and gateway data. (3) FDA-visible entities — seafood firms, importers, or brands with public FDA records connected to the metro’s lanes. (4) Confidence note — whether each result is direct, entity-level, lane-level, or only a general metro relevance signal. (5) Source note — which parts come from FDA records, NOAA customs-district data, Census counts, or proxies. The core design principle is transparency: FAT should not tell a user a product “was sold in your neighborhood” without direct evidence.

What the Public Record Cannot Yet Do

The metro feature will still have hard limits. NOAA’s trade database is aggregated by product code, port of entry, and partner country — not by firm, brand, or neighborhood. Census business counts show establishment presence, not shipment volume. ERS F-MAP covers only 10 metros and ends in 2018. FDA’s public enforcement data remain incomplete in important ways, especially for foreign firms and underlying inspection records. The honest product language is not “where this fish was sold,” but rather how visible this seafood lane is in the public record, and how relevant it is to this metro.^2,3,5,6,7

Why This Is Still Worth Doing

Even with those limits, metro search materially improves the public usefulness of the FAT App. It lets the app answer a local question, not just a regulatory one, and bridges the gap between users who think geographically and regulatory systems that record events by firm or facility. In practical terms, the added seafood information lets FAT do what the raw FDA record cannot do by itself: translate federal enforcement history into local market meaning.

Conclusion

Seafood can be searched by metro area in a way that is useful, rigorous, and transparent. The best current public implementation is a layered product: FDA enforcement records for the regulatory history, NOAA trade data for gateway and product-lane context, Census business data for metro seafood infrastructure, and USDA ERS metro retail proxies for comparable urban demand patterns. The result is not a perfect city-distribution map. It is something more defensible and more useful: a metro-area seafood relevance engine built on the public record.

Endnotes

1. USDA ERS, “Food-at-Home Monthly Area Prices — Documentation,” updated Apr. 10, 2026. ERS says F-MAP covers 15 geographic areas, including 10 metropolitan areas, with monthly data for 2012–18. www.ers.usda.gov.
2. NOAA Fisheries, “Foreign Fishery Trade Data,” last updated Jan. 21, 2026. Supports monthly and annual summaries by year, product, country, and U.S. customs district; “imports for consumption” reflect actual entry into U.S. consumption channels. www.fisheries.noaa.gov.
3. NOAA Fisheries InPort, “Foreign Trade,” updated Mar. 4, 2026. Monthly volume and value separated by HTS product code, port of entry, and partner country. www.fisheries.noaa.gov.
4. U.S. Census Bureau, “County Business Patterns.” Statistics available at U.S., state, county, metropolitan-area, and ZIP-code levels. www.census.gov.
5. FDA, “FDA Data Dashboard.” Inspection and compliance data refreshed weekly, include only final actions; compliance data cover only a subset of actions; foreign-firm actions often take the form of import alerts not reported in that release. www.fda.gov.
6. FDA, “Inspection Classification Database.” FDA says the database does not represent a comprehensive listing of all conducted inspections. www.fda.gov.
7. FDA, “OII FOIA Electronic Reading Room.” Contains select records; content remains on the site for five years before archiving. www.fda.gov.
8. FDA, “Enforcement Reports” and “Enforcement Report Information and Definitions.” All recalls FDA monitors are included once classified; some may appear before classification. www.fda.gov.
9. NOAA Fisheries, “Fisheries of the United States,” updated Mar. 3, 2026. The U.S. imported 6.3 billion pounds of edible seafood in 2023; an estimated 80 percent of the seafood Americans ate that year came from foreign imports. www.fisheries.noaa.gov.
10. U.S. Census Bureau, “County Business Patterns (CBP) APIs,” June 26, 2025. CBP API data available at the metropolitan/micropolitan statistical-area level. www.census.gov.
11. USDA ERS, “Using Proprietary Data,” updated Jan. 8, 2025. Circana retail scanner data available for individual store locations or market areas; NielsenIQ TDLinx provides food-retail location information; access restricted to USDA-sponsored projects. www.ers.usda.gov.

Source data (internal): fat_fda_seafood_reporting_package_v2_2026-06-17 (warning-letter and import-alert lifecycle, NOAA trade context); fat_city_seafood_distribution_index_draft_2026-06-18; fat_city_seafood_gateway_proxy_2026-06-18; fat_city_seafood_cbp_scaffold_2026-06-18 (Farm Animal Transparency working datasets).