Cell-cultured meat could be on sale in the UK within a few years, the food regulator said, with applications for lab-grown steak, beef, chicken and foie gras already submitted, while a further 15 applications are expected in the next two years .
The food The Standards Agency (FSA) was awarded £1.6 million in government funding on Tuesday to develop an effective safety assessment process for the new food. It said the UK was an attractive market as it had a large number of vegans, vegetarians and flexitarians, a greater openness to new foods than many other European countries and a large financial sector to support start-up companies.
Cultured meat is produced by cells and does not require the raising or slaughter of animals. Farmed chicken is approved for sale to consumers in Singapore in 2020 and in the USA in 2023 and cultured steak is approved in Israel in 2024. Numerous companies around the world are developing similar products, including the use of pork and fish.
Raising livestock is a main cause of climate warming emissions and the destruction of nature. Cultured meat requires much less land and water to produce and avoids animal welfare issues.
While cultured meat had the same cells as slaughtered meat, it was still essential to ensure it was safe for human consumption, said Prof Robin May, the chief scientific adviser at the FSA. “Companies naturally aim for products that are indistinguishable from the animal equivalent, but the way they achieve this is fundamentally different.”
The cells are grown in a liquid and are encouraged to develop into muscle, blood and fat tissue. “You typically do this with a very complex cocktail of growth media and growth factors,” he said. “Are they all safe? Because there might be a little left over in the final product. Are there also any genetic changes in the cells that could make them dangerous in some way?”
But May said the developments were exciting: “There’s a lot of potential here for all sorts of benefits in terms of welfare, sustainability, health and just consumer choice.”
The FSA’s project to develop the assessment criteria will last two years and involve discussion with academic experts and the companies. This is intended to lead to an efficient approval process that is expected to take companies two years to complete. However, applications that have already been submitted to the FSA are currently being analysed.
The project is the first of its kind outside of South Korea. “Many of the techniques used to create cell-cultured products have previously been used to create cell-cultured medicines,” May said. “So for us it’s a huge advantage to be able to draw on that massive amount of evidence.”
He said the FSA was sometimes criticized for delays in making decisions on new foods: “[But] the most important thing is that the food you buy is food you can trust. So I think people expect us to go as far as possible in terms of establishing food safety.” Cultured meat companies say it is in important respects safer than traditional meat, as it avoids contamination with farm bacteria such as e.g. E coli and salmonella, and the given antibiotics for many farm animals.
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Linus Pardoe at the Good Food Institute Europe, which supports the development of cultured meat, said: “The new government clearly wants to capitalize on the strong investment made in UK cultured meat in recent years by bringing products to market on a way that the UK’s gold standard safety regulations. But to fully realize the potential of cultured meat, ministers must also provide a long-term boost to the FSA’s budget, enabling it to complete robust risk assessments within statutory timeframes.”
In July, the United Kingdom became the first country in Europe to approves cultured meat for use in pet foodafter Meatly’s chicken was approved by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Animal and Plant Health Agency.
Italy and two US states have banned the sale of cultured meat. In May, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said, “Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish.”
