Josh Farinella is a former general manager at Kerala, India-based shrimp processor and exporter Choice Canning. He was recently featured by the Outlaw Ocean Project as the source of allegations of labor abuse at Choice Canning’s Amalapuram facility. Farinella recently filed formal whistleblower complaints with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and several other federal agencies.
SeafoodSource: How did you end up working at Choice Canning?
Farinella: I initially started with Choice Canning when they opened up their production facility in Pittston, Pennsylvania, in 2015, and I spent several years with them. I moved on to Lund’s Fisheries in in New Jersey in 2020. Then, in 2023, Choice recruited me back saying they had this shiny new facility in Andhra Pradesh with state-of-the-art everything that's essentially going to revolutionize shrimp production overseas. I was definitely interested and had a couple of meetings with the owner. We got the salary all worked out and the employment contract signed.
SeafoodSource: Moving to India is a pretty big deal. What made you want to take that leap?
Farinella: The opportunity and the salary that was offered to me was essentially life-changing. It allowed my wife to not have to work anymore and gave us a pretty firm timeline of five years there until essentially retirement or semi-retirement somewhere with warm weather and beaches in the South Carolina area.
SeafoodSource: What did you know about the company before you signed the contract? What was their reputation, and what were you expecting out of working there?
Farinella: Like I said, I worked with them for five years in their Pennsylvania facility, so I already knew the products and the ownership. I knew the company had a great reputation and about all of the good PR they were receiving regularly. I had all of that to base my decision on.
SeafoodSource: Were there any other executives without connections to India in the company, or were you the only one?
Farinella: I was the only one. I was told by the owner that this was the first time in the Indian shrimp industry where an American had been brought in to run it.
SeafoodSource: Did they tell you why they chose you?
Farinella: I didn't ask why they chose me. Again, I knew the company, I had a good relationship with the company, and the opportunity was life-changing for me going down the road.
SeafoodSource: How long was the contract, and what was your job description?
Farinella: The agreement I had with the owner is that it would be five years, but it was a one-year renewing contract because I had to come back and renew my visa every year. I was hired to be the general manager of Unit 4, which was the new facility that was being built [in Bapatla].
There were going to be some new pieces of equipment that had never been used in shrimp production before; like for grading the shrimp, the accuracy would be increased, and the output would be higher. The technology involved would have made it so much more efficient and accurate. When I got there in October, I knew there was going to be about a month-and-a-half delay from when I arrived to when this new facility was going to be up and running. But as of two weeks ago, that facility still had another three or four months to go before it was going to be ready for inaugural trials. I got over there in October 2023, and I got back [to Pennsylvania] on 16 February.
SeafoodSource: What happened between October and February?
Farinella: So, I guess what happened is my eyes were opened to what the actual operations and conditions were. Once I got over there, it turned into something else very quickly. It started with antibiotic-positive shrimp being received at the factory. Then, when I sent a message out to the owner, saying, “Hey, what do we do with this?” You fully expect them to say, "Get rid of it, destroy it, and send it back." You don't expect them to say, “Ship it to the U.S.”
SeafoodSource: How did you find out the shrimp coming into the facility was antibiotic-positive?
Farinella: The raw material was tested when it arrived at an on-site laboratory that does rapid-result tests. If it tests positive there, it goes out to an external accredited laboratory for confirmation testing. This specific product had already tested positive on the internal and external laboratories, and in that time, it had already been packed for a customer. Once the confirmation came back and I sent that message out asking what they wanted me to do with it, the response was the same: “We give it to the customer.”
SeafoodSource: Besides antibiotics, it sounds like you began to have some concerns about labor conditions at the factory as well?
Farinella: There was a text message I received in the middle of the night – it might have been like 2:30 in the morning – from one of the production managers who was on-site, saying, “Hey, we've got an employee, a migrant worker, trying to run through the water-treatment portion of the facility to climb over a wall and get out because security won't allow her to leave. Her contractor wants her to pay money to be able to leave.” That's what initially set off some alarm bells and raised some red flags for me.
SeafoodSource: How did that specific situation get resolved?
Farinella: I was told it was just a misunderstanding, and then when you look into things further down the road, you realized maybe it wasn't a misunderstanding, like the sequences of misunderstandings lead to a pattern where you later found out these employees are not free to leave whenever they want. They work year-round with no days off. Some of them hadn't been able to go home in two-plus years.
SeafoodSource: Did you learn more about who the workers in the Amalapuram factory were?
Farinella: Most of them were migrant laborers from the Orissa area, which is a little bit north of Andhra Pradesh.
SeafoodSource: What was the work environment like at the factory, and what were the living arrangements like for the workers?
Farinella: So, to be clear, this was at the Amalapuram factory, not the new facility that was under construction. There’s also a factory in Cochin, and several other facilities they’re producing out of.
At the facility I was working at, there were over 650 workers living on-site, but only enough beds for 500 workers and enough toilet and shower facilities for about 250 workers; some of the showers didn’t even work sometimes. Some workers had been sleeping on mattresses on the floors, and some of them had to share a bed with somebody else. While one person worked, the other would be able to use the bed to sleep, and they would rotate off and on like that.
SeafoodSource: Do you know how much the workers were getting paid?
Farinella: The pay rates varied, but I know they weren't getting even the state-required minimum wage. There was a point where I was trying to renegotiate the workers’ wages with their contractors. I knew they were making INR 350 (USD 4.20, EUR 3.87) per day, and I proposed an increase to INR 400 (USD 4.81, EUR 4.42).
Shortly after that, one of Choice’s HR people said, “Hey, if you're going to increase their wages, you have to increase it to at least INR 450 [USD 5.41, EUR 4.97] a day so that it meets the minimum wage.”
I wasn't entirely sure how to take that to the owner, JT [Jose Thomas], because I figured he's going to be really upset that his people aren't getting paid minimum wage. We called his son, who was also one of the owners, and the son relayed the message to his father, who sent an email saying, “I can't believe this is happening. Choice always pays what we're supposed to pay.” Right after that, there was another email from the VP of HR with the legal team in copy, saying, “Sir, we're paying everybody exactly as you told us to pay them. You said we didn't have to pay the minimum wage until we move because we're only going to be here for a short amount of time.”
SeafoodSource: What is the wage of an average Indian worker? Is minimum wage enough to survive on?
Farinella: The way things were explained to me before I went over there is that most of the workers are just working to put food on the table – that the things like rent and mortgage aren't really a thing there because they're all living in the same houses that their parents and grandparents lived in, so they don't really have any bills. I don't know how true that is or isn't, but that's how it was explained to me.
In my own experience, produce and rice are pretty inexpensive. But I don't know, maybe it's just from my standard of living that USD 5.00 (EUR 4.60) a day is a bit of a stretch. From what I understand, they all had to pay fees to the labor contractors who recruited them as well. I never saw any of these employment contracts myself … but what I do know through an exchange with one of the migrant workers who hadn't been home in two years, is that she said she didn't have the money to go home, and the cost of a train ticket for her to go home was INR 450. It's me speculating, but it's tough to find a scenario, when your living expenses and food are already taken care of, you don't have 450 rupees to go see your family.
SeafoodSource: Were the workers misled in terms of how much they were going to be paid when they took these jobs? How did they end up in this situation?
Farinella: Again, that's not something I know for sure one way or the other. When I questioned one of the employee welfare executives about some of the conditions on-site, it was explained that these conditions were still way better than where they came from.
SeafoodSource: Were there any instances of unusual or unethical behavior that caught your eye?
Farinella: One of the men's dormitory areas, when I went on a tour of the facility, wouldn't even be shown to me. I stumbled across it accidentally when I decided to walk up on the roof of the ammonia compressor building. I saw the dormitory area with some bunks in it, and they were all full; there were mattresses lined up on the floor with migrant workers sleeping on them. I saw that they didn’t get blankets, sheets, pillows, or anything that anybody should be given if [they were] going to be living there. If you do any kind of research or even a simple Google search on signs of forced labor, what I was seeing checked every box.
SeafoodSource: How sure are you that these workers were being kept involuntarily at the facility?
Farinella: I had conversations with HR and with the employee welfare team where they said, “No, they can't go anywhere. They rely on a gate-pass system, where security and their employment contractors have to approve them leaving this facility.” That came with a timeline to come back by a certain time. There is an 8-foot wall that surrounds the entire compound, and at one point, part of that wall had a hole in it. Workers were using that hole to leave so they could bypass the gate-pass system and the security. They had to hurry up and patch that hole so that they were able to get their movements under control.
SeafoodSource: Did you get the feeling that this was standard practice in the Indian shrimp industry?
Farinella: Again, this was my first experience in the Indian shrimp industry. I really didn't have a lot to gauge where their practices stood in relation to the rest of the industry over there. But, there was an instance where Choice was looking for external peeling sheds to use. I was told, “Don't worry about it; everybody does it.” Industry-wise, that seemed to be a common practice, or at least it was what I was being told so that I wouldn't question it.
SeafoodSource: What about the use of external peeling sheds was a red flag for you?
Farinella: They're completely off the books; they're unregulated. Producers have to report all of their manufacturing facilities to the FDA to get a registration number. When you go through your annual audits, whether it’s [Best Aquaculture Practices] or [British Retail Consortium], or whatever else, you have to list everywhere you produce, and Choice made sure that these external peeling sheds were not documented.
SeafoodSource: Did you get the feeling that the auditors were just kept in the dark? Or, were they kind of willingly ignorant of this practice?
Farinella: So, BAP and BRC audits were both performed by the same certification body – SGS – and the same auditor was on-site for both of those audits. On both of those audits, the audit report states there are no outsourced processes – there's nothing done off-site. As far as whether the auditors were kept in the dark or whether were they just kind of going along to get along, I’m not sure. There's a section of the BAP audit report that states there's no local worker used, and there were only 250 migrant workers being used. Right after that's documented – right after the auditor takes those notes – he goes on a tour of the facility and physically walks past 700 workers in the facility and didn’t raise an eyebrow or ask a question.
SeafoodSource: What was your impression about the attitude of the company higher-ups toward the situation at the factory?
Farinella: It was clear to me through the records and the documentation that everybody knew what was happening. I could see stuff I was looped into via email or WhatsApp.
SeafoodSource: When did you decide to start collecting this documentation and for what purpose?
Farinella: Eventually, I reached the point where I knew something had to be done to change this situation. People shouldn't have to live like that. People shouldn't have to be involved in any kind of conditions like that. The U.S. consumer also needs to know that the food reaching our plates is safe. Once all of these things kind of clicked, I knew I had to do something to hopefully drive a change in the industry.
SeafoodSource: Are you saying the food coming out of this factory was not safe for human consumption?
Farinella: Well, antibiotic-positive products are banned by the FDA for a reason. All of the product that comes out of these peeling sheds – and we're talking 20,000 pounds per day just out of those sheds that comes over here – is produced in conditions that are far less than sanitary.
SeafoodSource: Does Choice exclusively contract with independent farms, or does it run any of its own farms?
Farinella: It's all contracted third parties farming the shrimp. Choice doesn't own any farms.
SeafoodSource: Did you get to know anything about the relationship Choice had with its farmers?
Farinella: Well, it was kind of an odd situation because for the books, as far as audits and what the rest of the world gets to see, they show that shrimp was only purchased from BAP-certified farms. When I had discussions with the upper QA management, they said, “No, that's actually a lie; Choice doesn't purchase from BAP farms – all product is purchased from local unregistered farms.” This conversation came about when I asked about all of the antibiotic-positive shrimp that was coming in because if we're purchasing from BAP farms, none of that should exist. Yet, here it was on a regular basis.
SeafoodSource: Did your relationship with Choice’s upper management change as you began to ask more questions about the things you were observing?
Farinella: Once things went from being explained as a one-off or misunderstanding to a very clear pattern, that's where things changed. I think we've all had a boss at one point in time or another who said, “Hey, mistakes are okay, but repeat mistakes are a problem.”
SeafoodSource: When did you decide to leave the company, and how did you inform management of your decision?
Farinella: I found myself really questioning things in December. Being that far from home in that area of the world, I don't know, maybe it was paranoia, maybe it was a legitimate safety concern, but I decided that I was going to tender my resignation from the airport on my way back to the [United] States. I sent an email to ownership saying, “Hey, I'm going to use two weeks of my PTO time, and once that's up effective 1 March, I'll be resigning my position.”
SeafoodSource: What was their reaction?
Farinella: The only text I got from anybody was from one of the owners, who said, “Hey, we're sorry to see you go, but we need to ensure a smooth transition. Give me a call back.” I did not return that call, and Choice hasn't contacted me since. I do know that they have responded to [the Outlaw Ocean report]. Most of that response, I guess there's no point in hiding it, is centered around my background.
SeafoodSource: Are you willing to talk about that at all?
Farinella: We're going back 10-plus years in the past, where I had a lot of issues. I got in trouble on several occasions, and it was all related to writing bad checks, essentially. That's what it was. Choice’s response has been the narrative that the criminal Joshua Farinella can't be trusted because of this.
I get it; they’re trying to discredit the source, but at the end of the day, the research, the data, and the documentation doesn't lie. It speaks for itself, and it speaks loudly enough that it got the attention of the U.S. House Committee on Nature Resources and the attention of U.S. senators. It was serious enough that I filed federal whistleblower complaints with the U.S. [Food and Drug Administration], the [U.S. Customs] and Border Protection, [U.S. Department of] State, and [the U.S. Department of] Labor.
Looking past my background issues, if you look at recently, it's a regular thing that I'm invited to speak at food safety summits and conferences around the world. I was offered a seat on the Marine Stewardship Council Stakeholder Advisory Council, and there's only 13 of those seats in the world. I was offered a spot on the academic advisory council for Seton Hall University’s Stillman School of Business, but “highly respected industry professional Joshua Farinella” doesn’t fit Choice’s narrative.
SeafoodSource: Ultimately, why are you stepping forward in such a public way with your concerns?
Farinella: [I did this] because change needs to happen, both in consumers knowing that their product is safe and that all of these workers, no matter where they are, should be treated with that same amount of respect regardless of where they’re from or what they’re doing. So, I'm doing this because I want to see a change or at least the beginnings of a change.
SeafoodSource: Where are you now? What's your situation now? What are your next steps?
Farinella: I’m job-hunting, basically, even though I know it's highly likely that once this comes out, there is a chance that I'll be completely blackballed from the seafood industry. I've kind of accepted that, but I guess I can live with that. I can transition to other food sectors, but I’m not entirely sure what my future holds.
SeafoodSource: Do you really think that the seafood industry will blackball you?
Farinella: It's a close-knit industry; everybody knows everybody. Time will tell. I mean, there are so many companies that process overseas, so why is it really necessary to take a chance on me, who just came back from overseas and all of this happened? It really comes down to how much any company really wants to show that they're doing the right thing.
