Australia's first food safety application for cultivated meat

Application 1269 Cultured Quail as a Novel Food

Food Standards Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ) has assessed the application made by Vow to have its cultured quail product approved as a Novel Food, and is now undertaking public consultation to assist further consideration of the application.

We have made a submission to FSANZ, which has been co-signed by Arta Bioanalytics, CoLabs, Daisy Labs, Eden Brew, and Magic Valley.

In our submission, we advocate in some of the following areas:

• We ask FSANZ to consider streamlining the regulatory process to support the eventual development of a cultivated meat regulatory pathway.
• We suggest some alterations to data requirements to streamline the application process, arguing that overregulation may otherwise become a barrier to commercialisation.
• We advocate against FSANZ's proposal to mandate a single qualifying term as well as their preference for the term ‘cell-cultured’ for food labelling purposes.

You can view our submission here.

The first round of public consultation is now closed and the submissions received will be considered in preparing a draft amendment to the Food Standards Code. A second round of consultation is scheduled for the first half of 2024, which will be an opportunity to provide further input into how cellular agriculture food products will be assessed, approved and labelled in the future.

If you'd like to learn more about FSANZ's consultation process and what comes next, check our our recent article.

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