The UK Government will create a new regulatory sandbox for cultivated meat, with the aim to boost innovation in the sector, it has announced. The regulatory sandbox will be Europe’s first.
The Government suggested that it would create regulatory sandboxes for engineering biology, which includes alternative proteins, in its National Vision for Engineering Biology policy paper last year. The sandbox for cultivated meat comes with funding commitments of £1.6m for the Government’s Engineering Biology Sandbox Fund (EBSF).
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) and Food Standards Scotland (FSS) will collaborate to help guide companies on how they can demonstrate their products and processes are safe and in line with the UK’s novel food regulatory framework.
New staff will be recruited for the sandbox, who will gather scientific evidence about cultivated meat products, as well as the technology used to make them, to ensure product safety.
They will also, in turn, help companies who are planning on submitting applications for cultivated meat, and will also work closely with scientists in order to provide guidance on key questions, such as cultivated meat labelling and hygiene considerations for production facilities.
The FSA is currently reviewing at least four novel food applications for cultivated meat, including for French cultivated chicken company, Vital Meat. UK company Meatly, which produces cultivated pet food, recently became the first company to gain approval for cultivated meat in Europe.
According to the FSA, its regulated product system is under resourced. Applications currently take an average of 2.5 years to be authorised, while the department has a statutory aim of 17 months.
What is a regulatory sandbox?
A regulatory sandbox is a controlled environment, which usually exists for a limited period, in which businesses can test new products under a regulator’s supervision.
While the FSA’s sandbox for cultivated meat is Europe’s first, it comes after South Korea’s regulatory innovation zone for novel food and cultivated meat production.
The aim of the sandbox is to enable cultivated meat applications to be processed, and to go through, more quickly. The assessment approaches in the sandbox could also potentially be applied to other innovative foods, the FSA suggested.
“Ensuring consumers can trust the safety of new foods is one of our most crucial responsibilities. The cell cultivated products sandbox programme 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, the FSA’s chief scientific advisor.
Novel food approval: UK vs. EU
Because the UK used to be a member of the EU, many aspects of its novel food process are the same and the UK retains the requirements set in the EU regulations and European Food Standards Agency (EFSA) guidance published before Brexit.
However, the UK cannot use the Food Additives Intake Model (FAIM) tool used by the EFSA to estimate consumer exposure to a novel food, and instead uses the National Diet and Nutrition Surveys. The FSA and FSS must consider application dossiers submitted with three homogenous replicates of the novel food ingredients batches, instead of the five the EFSA requires.
