The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is to assess the safety of cell-based products.
FSA and Food Standards Scotland (FSS) have been awarded £1.6 million ($2.1 million) in funding to launch a program for cell-cultivated products.
While “cell-based,” “cultivated” and “cultured” are preferred terminologies, other terms such as “in vitro,” “artificial,” “fake,” “clean” and “lab-grown” have been used.
Cell-based products are new foods made without using traditional farming methods such as rearing livestock or growing plants and grains. Using science and technology, cells from plants or animals are grown in a controlled environment to make a food product.
Building knowledge
There are currently no cell-based products approved for human consumption in the UK.
FSA said it was important to learn more about these products and how they’re made, to make sure they’re safe for consumers to eat.
The two-year program will allow a team to be recruited to work across the FSA and FSS. They will gather scientific evidence on cell-based products and the technology used to make them.
This information will enable the regulators to make well-informed and timely recommendations about product safety and address questions that must be answered before any products can enter the market. It will allow the agencies to better guide companies on how to make products in a safe way and how to demonstrate their safety.
The team will also be able to offer pre-application support to companies and address key questions, for example around labeling.
“Ensuring consumers can trust the safety of new foods is one of our most crucial responsibilities. The program will enable safe innovation and allow us to keep pace with new technologies being used by the food industry to ultimately provide consumers with a wider choice of safe foods,” said Professor Robin May, FSA chief scientific advisor.
FAO and WHO on cell-based food
Meanwhile, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and World Health Organization (WHO) have published two reports on cell-based food.
The first covers a webinar that was held to announce the publication “Food safety aspects of cell-based food” in April 2023. It included results from a hazard identification of cell-based food.
Experts said most of the hazards were common to conventional food products and emphasized the importance for food safety authorities to focus on the materials, inputs, and equipment specific to cell-based food production. Regulatory experts from the governments of Singapore and Qatar presented on their respective countries’ legal frameworks. Speakers from six countries agreed that food safety assessments are a crucial starting point.
The second report details an FAO and WHO hybrid meeting in Rome in September 2023 on the safety of cell-based food in the Near East region.
A total of 53 participants attended. The event highlighted the international activities that FAO and WHO have conducted so far, and results of a pre-event survey about current regulations in the region.
Many delegates said good public awareness of cell-based food was essential to move forward. However, they added that currently, knowledge of the food among the general public was limited.
Finally, earlier this month 60 experts met in Toronto, Canada, to talk about cell-based food and precision fermentation.
The meeting was hosted by the Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) with the help of the FAO Liaison Office for North America. Attendees discussed various technical issues around foods derived from cell culturing and precision fermentation. They covered the state of commercial and regulatory landscapes in 2024, with a focus on food safety in the latest developments of technologies and techniques.
It is the third such event which the FAO has co-organized, following the first meeting with the Ministry of Health in Israel in 2022 and the second with the China National Center for Food Safety Risk Assessment in 2023.
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