Grocery store meat and fish labeling has three overlapping problems: origin claims that mean less than they sound, quality terms with no legal definition, and a global supply chain so fragmented that even the retailer often can't trace it.
The "Product of USA" label was the most exploited loophole in American food labeling for nearly a decade. Here's exactly what it meant — and what it still doesn't tell you.
In 2015, Congress repealed mandatory country-of-origin labeling (COOL) for beef and pork after Canada and Mexico won a WTO dispute. What followed was a decade-long loophole: meat from animals born, raised, and slaughtered entirely abroad could be labeled "Product of USA" as long as it passed through a USDA-inspected plant for repackaging. Unwrapping and rewrapping a box of Brazilian beef was legally sufficient. Major meatpacking corporations — many foreign-owned — used this extensively to market imported product at domestic price premiums.
In March 2024, the USDA finalized a new rule: "Product of USA" now requires animals to be born, raised, slaughtered, and processed in the United States. This took effect January 1, 2026. It closes the repackaging loophole. But the label remains voluntary. Producers aren't required to tell you where their meat came from at all — they only need to meet the standard if they choose to use the claim. Most grocery store beef and pork carries no country-of-origin information whatsoever, and is not legally required to.
JBS (Brazilian), Tyson Foods, Cargill, and National Beef process approximately 85% of all U.S. beef. JBS — the largest — is headquartered in São Paulo and has faced federal bribery investigations, food safety violations, and antitrust scrutiny. When your steak came from a large grocery chain with no origin label, the odds are high it passed through one of these four facilities. The butcher counter aesthetic at the store does not reflect the actual supply chain upstream.
Several widely-used terms on meat packaging have no federal legal definition, are self-certified by producers, or have definitions that diverge significantly from consumer expectations.
Seafood has the most opaque supply chain of any protein category — governed by two different federal agencies under two different sets of rules, with documented mislabeling rates up to 43% for certain species.
In the US, wild Atlantic salmon is commercially extinct — all Atlantic salmon at your grocery store is farmed. All wild-caught salmon is Pacific (sockeye, king/chinook, coho, pink, chum). This makes substitution easy to execute: a fish counter employee labels farmed Atlantic salmon as "wild" or "Pacific" and charges the premium price. Oceana's 2015 study found 43% of salmon samples mislabeled; 69% of those mislabeled samples were farmed Atlantic sold as wild-caught. A 2018 New York AG investigation found 30% of "sockeye salmon" samples were farmed Atlantic. Even a 2024 Seattle study, a decade after Washington State passed legislation specifically against salmon fraud, still found 13.5% mislabeling at grocery stores.
The US exports vast quantities of wild Alaskan salmon to China for processing (filleting, portioning, packaging) because labor costs are dramatically lower. In 2013, the US exported approximately 85,000 metric tons of wild salmon to China — but only about 37,000 metric tons returned. What happened to the rest is, in the words of Oceana, "anyone's guess." Once your fish enters the global seafood supply chain, its species identity and origin documentation can be altered at multiple processing points before it returns to a US retail display labeled "wild Pacific salmon."
Seafood origin labeling is split between USDA and US Customs and Border Protection, under different rules. Both require country-of-origin disclosure — but neither requires disclosure of where it was caught or whether it is farmed or wild, unless the product has been "transformed" (Customs) or "processed" (USDA) — and those two agencies define those terms differently. The result: a fish can change hands, cross multiple borders, and arrive at your counter with a country-of-origin label that reflects where it was last processed, not where it was caught.
A butcher or fishmonger who can't answer these questions doesn't have the supply chain visibility to back up their claims. A good one will know immediately.
Independent butchers and fishmongers typically source from a small number of farms and vessels they know by name. The supply chain is short enough that traceability is built in — not marketed onto a label. San Francisco has several.
These vendors were verified for sourcing transparency — not just for being independent, but for having the supply chain knowledge to answer the questions above.
This is one investigation. There are twenty more — covering supplements, protein bars, chocolate, and the conglomerates behind brands you think are independent.
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