Submission - A1269 Cultured Quail CFS1

In 2024, CAA led the development of a submission to FSANZ’ assessment of A1269 Cultured Quail as a Novel Food, an application from cultivated meat company Vow. As the first cultivated meat application, this is a landmark for cellular agriculture in Australia. Organisations from across the sector co-signed our submission, and multiple other stakeholders leveraged our content to produce their own submissions.

In our submission, we were pleased to note that FSANZ found no safety, nutritional or allergenicity concerns with Vow’s application. We expressed our ongoing support for the development of a dedicated regulatory pathway for cultivated meat. We also noted it was likely too early in the sector’s development to draft an all-encompassing standard, and suggested FSANZ consider how their findings could inform guidance for a future assessment framework.

In its second call for submissions, FSANZ adopted a number of the recommendations we presented in our first submission and ongoing advocacy efforts, leading to three key favourable outcomes:

• Dedicated regulatory pathway: FSANZ proposed to introduce new standards to The Food Standards Code - effectively creating a dedicated regulatory pathway for cultivated meat.
• Widening of accepted labelling terms: FSANZ revised its approach to product labelling, expanding its initial requirement of a single mandated qualifying term (‘cell-cultured’) to also permit ‘cell-cultivated’, recognising the need to build in flexibility to support international regulatory harmonisation.
• Consistency of labelling terms: FSANZ adopted our recommendation to require the chosen term to be used consistently across both the food name and statement of ingredients

Together, these changes contribute to creating a clearer and more attractive pathway for regulatory approvals whilst also fostering trust and confidence in cultivated meat products.