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OGA Developing Seafood Compliance Guide

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The Ohio Grocers Association here is working to develop a new best practices guide to help its members correctly measure the weight of frozen fish, the organization announced in its Weekly Checkout newsletter.

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The Ohio Grocers Association here is working to develop a new best practices guide to help its members correctly measure the weight of frozen fish, the organization announced in its Weekly Checkout newsletter.

OGA officials recently met with the Ohio Department of Agriculture's deputy director, Rocky Black, and Chief Legal Counsel William Hopper regarding frozen seafood tare.

"ODA is finding a number of violations wherein the tare for seafood is incorrect due to the ice glaze on products," the newsletter explains. "When adjusting the tare in your seafood department, you must also allow for the ice so that you are ensuring an accurate weight/pricing structure."

Last year, a multi-state investigation organized by the Weights and Measures division of Wisconsin's Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection revealed short-weighting to be a widespread problem with frozen seafood sold at retail. Investigators in Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, New York, Ohio, Washington and Wisconsin removed more than 21,000 non-compliant packages of seafood from supermarket freezers in January and February 2010.

OGA has stated that it will remind its members of this ongoing issue, and will "eventually publish a 'best practices' guide to our membership to aid in such compliance. As OGA works on this guide, we strongly encourage all of our members with seafood departments to check their tares and to do their best to show good-faith compliance in this area. This is an area that ODA/Weights and Measure is enforcing."

TAGS: Meat Seafood