🚨 Regulatory news for UK cultivated meat 🚨 Today’s announcement that the Food Standards Agency is launching a regulatory sandbox for cultivated meat is another sign that the UK wants to regulate to accelerate innovation in alternative proteins and boost consumer trust.
⏪ Last September, in our UK Ecosystem Report (link in comments), The Good Food Institute Europe called for a regulatory sandbox to help accelerate the authorisation of a new generation of alternative proteins like cultivated meat. Since then, we have been pleased to collaborate with a number of stakeholders across the cultivated meat community and share our perspectives with the FSA. Now...it’s happening.
📈 Why do we need this? UK public investment in cultivated meat is growing quickly and start-ups are readying for scale-up. If we don’t invest in our regulatory capacity, we only increase the likelihood that the UK will fail to capture enough of the benefits that cultivated meat can bring for the environment, jobs, food production and more.
✅ Sandboxes have become an increasingly common way to meet the challenges and opportunities of a new technology as it gets closer to market. Working together, they allow businesses, researchers and regulators to address regulatory uncertainties. The FSA’s cultivated meat sandbox will be specifically focused on boosting the regulator's understanding of how this technology works, key food safety questions and other components of product authorisation, like labelling and nomenclature.
🗣️ Sharing findings and guidance from the sandbox is absolutely key. Moving forward, cultivated meat businesses need all the information necessary to tick every box when they submit a product for authorisation – without expecting further questions and delays. Equally, considerations around food safety identified by the sandbox need to be made clearly available for the public, to continue developing public trust and acceptance of cultivated meat
💷 Lastly, as I shared with Peter Foster at the Financial Times, whilst the sandbox is clearly a fantastic step forward, let’s not overlook the long-term funding that the Food Standards Agency requires to perform its business-as-usual regulatory functions. We look forward to engaging across government as part of the multi-year spending review to ensure the FSA gets a fair settlement that enables it to regulate alternative proteins effectively in the future.
