Kate & Kimi Accused of Creating Fake Seafood Brand

By Betty Richardson

Well, this is utterly bizarre. A Shanghai-based softball team, the Thundersharkz, has published a damning WeChat article based on information being discussed on the Shanghai Expat forum, accusing online grocer Kate & Kimi of creating a fake seafood brand used on their website.

The 'Blue Coral' website

The article questions the authenticity of a seafood company called 'Blue Coral Seafood Cooperative' on the Kate & Kimi website. The sleuthing sharkz suggest that this brand, which Kate & Kimi apparently "announced a partnership with in July 2016" is a fictitious company, used as a front to sell items including fresh salmon.

'Blue Coral' salmon for sale on the Kate & Kimi website

Further investivation into the Blue Coral website, conducted by a user named 'anonymous7890' claims to have uncovered that the domain was registered to Kate & Kimi's operations director, Jojo Hu, on May 10, 2016. The user claims to have done this using the whois.net domain searcher tool.

The Blue Coral website, which consists of just three pages, states that it has been running for "over 30 years" and works with "14 distributors in 21 countries," though the anonymous poster claims that the company has "zero online presence" prior to the website.

The article also alleges that the site originally contained three now deleted profiles of Blue Coral's "founders," described as "1 Brit, 1 Frenchman & 1 Scot."

A screengrab from the Blue Coral website used by the Thundersharkz WeChat account.

In an even more bizarre turn of events, the images used for these founders appeared to have been pulled from random people on the internet, and were in actual fact of a Frank Zaballos, of Seattle, USA; Tore Lindholme, Associate Professor at the Norwegian Center for Human Rights, University of Oslo; and Sam Rogers, a retired Landscape Architect Professor at the University of Tennessee.

A screengrab from the University of Oslo's profile of Tore Lindholm used by the Thundersharkz WeChat account. 

The post on the Shanghai Expat website also alleges that images used on the Blue Coral website were borrowed from various sources, including a National Geographic documentary on commercial salmon fishing in Alaska, and a salmon processing facility that is "a Loop Cold Storage facility in Texas, hosted on the website of Johnny Q Photography."

Confused? So are we.

This all sounds completely fishy to us. The 'Blue Coral' website, the accusations, the motive of the person who took the time to compile this information and, last but not least, that a softball team, with no apparent connection to Kate & Kimi, took it upon themselves to publish it. 

Following the initial anonymous post, several Shanghai Expat users voiced their support for Kate & Kimi, accusing the allegations of being a "competitor takedown." Others noted that the fish and salmon that they had purchased from the online grocer was "second to none."

Kate & Kimi published a response to the allegations on their website, admitting that Blue Coral Seafood Cooperative's website was "hastily published in its raw form," blaming "utterly irresponsible designers." They added that they "should not have launched the brand" before "analyzing" its content.

However, they have not given full disclosure as to who exactly the Blue Coral Seafood Cooperative is, nor where the "sustainable" seafood is traceable to, describing it as "sustainably farmed fish."

A logo created for Blue Coral Seafood Cooperative describing it "from sea to table."

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