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FSA will look at the safety of cell-based food

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FSA will look at the safety of cell-based food

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is required 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 cell cultured products programme.

While ‘cell-based’, ‘cultured’ and ‘cultured’ are the preferred terminologies, other terms have also been used such as ‘in vitro’, ‘artificial’, ‘fake’, ‘clean’ and ‘lab-grown’.

Cell-based products are new foods that are made without using traditional agricultural methods, such as raising livestock or growing plants and grains. Using science and technology, cells from plants or animals are grown in a controlled environment to create a food product.

Building knowledge
There are currently no cell-based products approved for human consumption in Britain.

FSA said it is important to learn more about these products and how they are made to ensure consumers can eat them safely.

The two-year program allows a team to be recruited to work within the FSA and FSS. They will gather scientific evidence about cell-based products and the technology used to make them.

This information will enable regulators to make informed and timely recommendations on product safety and answer questions that need to be answered before products can go to market. It will allow agencies to better guide companies in making products safely and demonstrating their safety.

The team will also be able to provide companies with pre-application support and answer important questions, for example around labelling.

“Ensuring that consumers can trust the safety of novel foods is one of our most crucial responsibilities. The program will enable safe innovation and allow us to keep pace with the new technologies being used by the food industry to ultimately offer consumers a wider choice of safe food,” said Professor Robin May, Chief Scientific Adviser to the FSA.

FAO and WHO on cell-based foods
Meanwhile, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) have published two reports on cell-based nutrition.

The first concerns a webinar held to announce the publication ‘Food Safety Aspects of Cell-Based Foods’ in April 2023. It contained results from a hazard identification of cell-based foods.

Experts said most of the dangers were common with 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 gave a presentation on the legal frameworks of their respective countries. Speakers from six countries agreed that food safety assessments are a crucial starting point.

The second report describes a hybrid FAO-WHO meeting in September 2023 in Rome on the safety of cell-based foods in the Near East region.

There were 53 participants in total. The event highlighted the international activities that FAO and WHO have carried out to date, and the results of a pre-event survey on current regulations in the region.

Many delegates said good public awareness of cell-based foods was essential to making progress. However, they added that knowledge of the food among the general public was currently limited.

Finally, earlier this month, 60 experts gathered in Toronto, Canada, to discuss cell-based nutrition and precision fermentation.

The meeting was organized by the Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) with the assistance of the FAO Liaison Office for North America. Attendees discussed various technical issues surrounding foods derived from cell culture and precision fermentation. They covered the state of commercial and regulatory affairs in 2024, with a focus on food safety in the latest developments in technologies and techniques.

It is the third event co-organized by FAO, 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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