Developing standards for cultured meat

The British Standards Institution (BSI) has released a report on “The Future of Sustainable Alternative Proteins: Cultivated Meats“. The document explores the role that well-established standards could play in creating trust in cultured meat and summarizes insights from a roundtable hosted with Innovate UK and Multus Media, including stakeholders from government, academia, non-profits, and industry.

Turning to cultured meat and seafood can provide health benefits to consumers by eliminating contaminants like antibiotics or microplastics, providing healthier fats, and reducing the risk of foodborne illness.  And the potential benefits to the environment are clear. But the industry faces technical and infrastructure challenges as it scales up, and needs to gain widespread consumer acceptance for these new foods. Well-established standards and regulatory clarity are important aspects of this process.

The report points to the pharma and cosmetics industries, where products are developed under highly controlled and regulated laboratory conditions. The development of standards and regulations for cultured meat can facilitate faster regulatory reviews and ensure safety. They can also provide guide rails for scale-up and commercialization efforts. Communication of these standards will provide consumers with confidence that the products are safe to use.  But, it would not be appropriate to take regulations from a different area, like medicines, and apply them directly to cultured meat and seafood. There needs to be a balance of scientific critical thinking without an overload of testing and control.

Vireo has been working with New Harvest on a Cultured Meat Safety Initiative to identify priority test methods and data sets to advance this work.