This story is a product of an NBC News investigation in collaboration with The Outlaw Ocean Project, a nonprofit journalism organization.
Joshua Farinella had been working in the seafood industry for eight years when he received an exotic job offer too lucrative to pass up — managing a shrimp factory in southern India. The salary: $300,000, more than double what he was making previously.
“I packed up two suitcases and moved 8,000 miles away,” said Farinella, 45, of Pittston, Pennsylvania. “It was supposed to be life-changing.”
But just a few months after he arrived on the job in October 2023, Farinella said he became deeply disturbed by what he was witnessing.
His company, Choice Canning, supplies shrimp to major U.S. grocery chains including Walmart, Aldi, ShopRite and H.E.B. It touts its “state-of-the-art processing plant” and “commitment to international standards of quality.”
But Farinella said he soon discovered that Choice Canning operated unsanitary offsite “peeling sheds” and routinely approved the export of shrimp tainted with antibiotics in violation of U.S. food safety law.
The company’s treatment of workers was equally jarring to Farinella, he said. Migrant workers rarely had a day off, slept in overcrowded, bedbug-infested dorms and were restricted from leaving the walled-off company compound in Amalapuram, according to Farinella. They were mostly women who were often recruited from the poorest sections of the country.
Farinella left the job after about four months, but not before recording conversations with senior leadership and capturing video footage of conditions at the plant and at an offsite peeling facility.
“The consumers need to understand that they’ve been purchasing a contaminated product that was made by people who don’t have the luxury of going home,” said Farinella, who has filed a whistleblower complaint with the Food and Drug Administration and other regulators detailing his allegations and has…
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