The Food and Drug Administration issued a warning to the public about the Great Value shrimp at Walmart. Consumers should not eat, serve, or sell any shrimp that’s been recently bought from the retailer.
The reason for the Biblical-sounding warning was that shrimp was found to be laced with radioactive material. A statement released by health officials revealed that shipping containers from Indonesian company Bahari Makmur Sejati (BMS) were found to be contaminated with Cesium-137 (Cs-137), which is radioactive in nature. The company has been a long-time supplier of shrimp to Walmart.
NBC reports that shrimp processed by BMS are sold in 13 states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, and West Virginia. Health officials have strongly advised that if a consumer has bought shrimp from Walmart in any of these states — do not consume it by any means.
It was just recently that people consuming raw milk found themselves in serious medical conditions that supposedly even caused a toddler to die in Florida, so the necessity of warnings like this cannot be understated. Cs-137 is the radioactive form of cesium, a silvery-white metal that melts into liquid form at room temperature — which makes it nearly impossible for the human eye to detect under low scrutiny.
Cs-137 can damage DNA within the living cells of the body and lead to an increased risk of various forms of cancer. And from a business perspective for Walmart – as we’ve also seen with the case of raw milk in Florida – this can put the company at risk of a lawsuit, perhaps even a class-action lawsuit if they didn’t pull the shrimp from shelves fast enough. When BMS and Walmart were reached for comment, the two companies did not respond to the queries.
The FDA notified the public that they immediately alerted US Customs and Border Protection that containers from BMS Indonesia could have Cs-137 contamination. Despite recent criticism of being overzealous, the CBP’s swift action was actually welcome in this particular case, and containers arriving in Los Angeles, Houston, and Miami that tested positive for Cs-137 were denied entry into the nation.
Online, the story spread like wildfire, and while you’d expect people to be overly concerned on X, Americans took the approach of “it’s better to laugh than to cry.” One user posted a meme of a man glowing green after consuming radioactive material. Another user even called the shrimp “working man’s Ozempic.” Most users just posted memes of people turning into superheroes at hospitals.
Me after I ate the radioactive shrimp from Walmart pic.twitter.com/mKNcJAGXsI
—𝙳◌𝚙𝚊𝚖𝚒𝚗𝚎 (@iSynesthete) August 19, 2025
Walmart is rebranding it’s shrimp as the working man’s Ozempic.
— 𝕊𝕦𝕟𝕕𝕒𝕖_𝔾𝕦𝕣𝕝 (@SundaeDivine) August 20, 2025
United States Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has not yet personally commented on this particular situation. But it’s very likely that people on social media are more than ready to meet his commentary with very loud and targeted criticism for all the other things he might not always get right. Health officials, however, added that the Cs-137 detected in the shrimp was only a cause for health concern and did not surpass a “derived intervention level.”
