Lab-grown meat safe for consumption, says FDA

THE Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday declared a lab-grown meat product developed by a California start-up to be safe for human consumption, paving the way for products derived from real animal cells - but that don’t require an animal to be slaughtered - to someday be available in U.S. grocery stores and restaurants.

Dozens of major food companies are jostling to debut cultivated meat to the American public. As of now, Singapore is the only country in which these products are legally sold to consumers. The FDA’s announcement that cultivated chicken from Emeryville-based Upside Foods is safe to eat is likely to open the floodgates in the United States in the coming months.

Upside Foods, formerly known as Memphis Meats, is harvesting cells from viable animal tissues and growing edible flesh under controlled conditions in bioreactors, flesh the firm says will be identical to that raised conventionally. Alternatives to traditional animal agriculture are seen as a way to mitigate climate change, and have been a major topic of discussion this week at the United Nations climate change conference in Sharm elSheikh, Egypt.

Whether consumers will embrace this form of meat remains a question. Despite the money and hopes invested in realistic simulated-meat products such as Beyond and Impossible, which are made with vegetable protein, the market for these altmeat products has cooled. High prices, too, will be a challenge to widespread adoption, experts say.

Still, boosters of cultivated meat say it has huge potential.

“We will see this as the day the food system really started changing,” said Costa Yiannoulis, managing partner at Synthesis Capital, the world’s largest food technology fund. “The U.S. is the first meaningful market that has approved this - this is seismic and groundbreaking.”

Wednesday’s announcement takes cultivated meat, also called cell-cultured meat, a step closer to Americans’ dinner plates, but there are still hurdles to widespread availability. Upside’s chicken-production technology is transferrable to multiple animal species, Yiannoulis said, but each product will have to be approved by federal regulators before it can go to market. Upside estimates that upon approval from the Agriculture Department, it would still be months before its chicken could be on the market.

“It will have to be case by case, certainly for the first few. It won’t be boilerplate approval,” Yiannoulis said. Still, the approval signals that the agency may soon approve the products of several cultivated meat startups that have been seeking regulatory approval since 2018. he said.

The cultivated-meat industry has grown to more than 151 companies on six continents, backed by more than $2.6 billion in investments, according to the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit group that promotes alternatives to traditional meat. Still, initial costs of production may make products prohibitively expensive.

“It’s actually hard to make a reasonable facsimile of an animal tissue from cultured cells,” Pat Brown, founder of plantbased Impossible Foods, told The Washington Post last year. “Theoretically it’s doable, and there’s no question that it will be done at some point. But it will never be done with anything remotely like the economics you need for food.”

If lab meats can replicate the taste and texture of traditional meat - at a similar or lower cost and with fewer downsides - it could be a game changer for global nutrition, many experts have said. The Stockholm Environment Institute recently issued a report that found the production of animal-based foods responsible for as much as 20 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions, and that if meat consumption continues along current trends, it will be impossible to keep global warming below the goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius.

“This is a critical milestone toward the future of food. Cultivated meat will soon be available to consumers in the U.S. who desire their favorite foods made more sustainably, with production requiring a fraction of the land and water of conventional meat when produced at scale,” said Bruce Friedrich, president of the Good Food Institute.

Not everyone, however, is convinced the public will adopt this new technology.

“The FDA is using the same regulatory review process as biotech crops, which has not resulted in widespread consumer confidence or universal marketplace acceptance,” said Gregory Jaffe, biotechnology project director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

The regulation of lab-grown meat in the United States is being done collaboratively between the FDA and USDA. Under a March 2019 formal agreement, both agencies agreed to a joint regulatory framework wherein the FDA oversees cell collection, cell banks and cell growth and differentiation. And then the USDA will oversee the processing and labeling of human food products derived from the cells of livestock and poultry.

Every firm that makes these products must get approval from each agency, whether or not they follow the same production method as a firm that has received approval, the USDA said in a statement. Companies that want to produce these products commercially must also apply for a USDA grant of inspection, and facilities will be subject to the same food safety, sanitation and inspection regulations as other meat and poultry products. The exception is cultivated seafood, which needs only FDA approval.

The FDA said in a statement it is already engaged in discussion with multiple firms about various types of products made from cultured animal cells, including those made from seafood cells, and that the FDA is ready to work with additional firms developing cultured animal cell food and production processes.

We will see this as the day the food system really started changing. The US is the first meaningful market that has approved this – this is seismic and groundbreaking.

— Costa Yiannoulis, managing partner at Synthesis Capital