As businesses wait patiently for market signals as to where best to invest in the capital intensive facilities needed to create products like meat and dairy from animal cells, regulators grapple with questions as to whether these products are safe; how should they be labelled; and what are the implications for trade when cross-border regulatory approaches lack harmony?
Speaking in December at a Westminster Nutrition and Food forum on novel foods and alternative proteins, Robin May, chief scientific adviser at the Food Standards Agency (FSA), described cultivated products as having both “fascinating potential” and “really challenging questions” for the regulator to answer.
May explained how cultivated products are almost unique within the food system, since they aim to mimic animal products that are already available, yet the science behind them is totally different to anything that had been seen previously. “You’ve got these two extremes of great familiarity and massive novelty in one product. And for that reason, we are very much of the view that this is a product class that is going to take some serious thought and also has huge potential,” said May.
Globally, Singapore, Israel and the US have been leading the charge in clearing the way for cultivated products to be available for people to try and buy, while BioKraft Foods and Meatable have both staged formal public tastings. But businesses wishing to establish a foothold in European markets have to-date been disappointed.
As things stand, no cultivated animal product has been approved for sale for human consumption in the UK (although cultivated meat company Meatly received approval to sell lab-grown chicken to pet food manufacturers last year).
The same applies in the EU where the novel foods approvals process is notoriously slow and complex to navigate, while the powerful livestock lobby has also worked to put cultivated meat on the back foot. In 2023, Italian MPs voted to ban the production, sale or import of cultivated meat or animal feed, citing a desire to defend traditional Italian farming.
Sandbox programme
There are, however, signs of movement in the UK which is now free to pursue its own path having left the regulatory orbit of the EU. Last year, the FSA, in collaboration with Food Standards Scotland, was awarded £1.6m in government funding to launch a ‘sandbox programme’ specifically for cultivated products.
The two-year collaborative project will see the regulators work with selected businesses and experts to generate insights that will allow them to better guide companies on how to evidence they are making cultivated products in a safe way, with the ultimate aim of smoothing the approvals process.
Those operating in markets like the US have cited the early, open and continued engagement with regulators as key to finding a path to market approval.
Dominic Watkins, global head of consumer sector and partner at DWF Group, welcomes the sandbox programme and says it’s important the FSA learns lessons from its experience managing the approvals process for CBD (cannabis-based) products, which caused frustration among businesses amid claims the FSA kept “moving the goalposts” over the evidence required from those seeking authorisation.
“They’ve got to be clear upfront about what standards need to be met for cultivated products,” says Watkins.
Given the glacial speed of progress at EU level, Watkins believes there is an opportunity for the UK to unlock commercial and social benefits through its approach to regulating cultivated products, both by attracting inward investment and realising some of the potential sustainability benefits associated with cultivated meat production such as (potentially) lower carbon emissions and land-use.
“Historically the novel foods approvals process has been very slow and for good reason – you want to make sure these foods are safe for people to consume. But there is a need to create a streamlined, robust process that doesn’t deter innovation,” he says.
Infrastructure challenge
Businesses for their part say they need regulatory certainty before investing (and attracting investment) in the infrastructure needed to produce cultivated products at scale.
Linus Pardoe, senior UK policy manager at the Good Food Institute Europe, which supports the development of the alternative proteins industry, told the Westminster forum that high capital expenditure was a material barrier to growing the sector. “We’re in a position where, if you want to scale your processes particularly as a start-up, you are looking at an environment in which you either need to purchase very, very expensive capital equipment or go to contract facilities that tend to be pharmaceutical grade in their practices, facilities and equipment. Both of those are extremely expensive, potentially prohibitively so for small start-ups.”
Ivy Farm Technologies is a spin out from Oxford University, producing cultivated beef from Angus and Wagyu breeds. Speaking at the conference, head of partnerships and marketing, Riley Jackson, said the company is “making some really incredible strides,” in producing meat from cells, in as little as three to four weeks versus around two years for a cow from the beef herd. However, “with that comes the question of, how do we scale and how do we commercialise?” In this respect the regulator is “the star of the show”, said Jackson, as she called for more initiatives like the sandbox programme that can help companies, such as Ivy Farm, gain regulatory approval for their products “and start contributing to the UK’s net-zero goals”.
Labelling debate
For regulators, questions over cultivated products don’t start and end with issues of consumer safety. The debate over what cultivated meat and dairy products should be called, and how they should be labelled, is likely to be fiercely contested if arguments and litigation over the use of ‘meat’ and ‘dairy’ descriptors on mainstream plant-based alternatives is any gauge.
Pardoe said he believes regulations will ultimately state that you have to clearly label cultivated foods. “In food law, you cannot mislead consumers.” (It is required in relation to most meat to state the location of rearing and slaughter.) “To not be clear on the origin of production within these products will probably be falling close to misleading consumers. I don’t think that’s in the interests of any stakeholder to be pushing for that.”
May from the FSA said questions of terminology and labelling would be critical outcomes of the sandbox programme, for which successful applicants will shortly be revealed.
He also pointed to the implications regarding trade, noting how animal products crossing borders are subject to a whole set of legislative requirements, including for an official veterinarian to check and sign off every consignment on food safety grounds. “That seems slightly counter intuitive” for cultivated products May said, but added: “On the other hand, you need to ensure that the framework is very clear about what something is and what it is not, and that the appropriate controls are in place for any risks associated with it.”
Foodservice to lead?
It’s difficult to put a time frame on when we can expect the first cultivated products to be available to purchase for human consumption in the UK.
Applications have already been made to the FSA and Watkins says it’s not impossible that products start to be approved by the end of this year.
Yet cultivated products are not only biologically more complex than CBD products, the ethical questions surrounding their production and consumption are multi-layered. UK retailers have long been wary of selling so-called ‘Frankenstein foods’, having felt the full force of the public and media backlash against the first wave of GM foods that emerged in the 1990s.
As Pardoe noted: “Market authorisation doesn’t mean that we’re going to be able to buy it in every Tesco in the country from day one. I think what we’ve seen in other jurisdictions is a very slow, incremental rollout, particularly in foodservice settings, and that’s likely to be where we will first encounter it in the food system in the UK.”
It’s an intriguing prospect for the foodservice sector. If and when cultivated products do receive the green light, restaurants and caterers could find themselves in the vanguard of a generational shift in how we eat.
If you have any questions about points raised above, or how this may affect your business, please get in touch with Dominic Watkins.
This article was originally prepared together with Footprint Media Group (co-authored by Nick Hughes) and is also here.
