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Delight Foods, a food importer based in New Jersey and California, is recalling 2,961 pounds of catfish steaks, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety Inspection Service announced Friday.
Delight Foods specializes in importing Indian food products to the United States. However, while some of these products are legal to import, meat, eggs, and poultry are not among them. Only certified establishments are permitted to export those categories of food to the U.S.
A certified establishment, per FSIS, is “an establishment that the country’s central competent authority certifies as meeting the requirements of the inspection system that that FSIS determined equivalent to the United States inspection system.”
This case is not the first time catfish products have run afoul of FSIS regulations. In June 2022, the agency put out a public health alert for a catfish product, by then no longer available for purchase, illegally imported from South Korea.
Only China, Thailand, and Vietnam are certified establishments for the export of catfish, called siluriformes by regulators.
The offending product comes in bags marked “Seafood delight FRESH FROZEN CATFISH STEAK IF.” Given that Indian catfish are forbidden for import, these packages do not have a USDA mark of inspection nor an establishment number.
While FSIS notes that there have been no cases of illness reported due to the Delight Foods catfish, it still urges consumers to either dispose of the product or return it to the venue of purchase.
