The UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) has received £1.6 billion from the government to launch a sandbox programme for the development of cell-cultivated products (CCPs).
Otherwise called lab-grown meat, CCPs are food products made from cells from plants and animals. They are increasingly being seen as an alternative to carbon-intensive farmed livestock.
The sandbox programme will allow businesses to work directly with the FSA to ensure that new food products derived from cell cultivation meet safety standards as they are being developed.
“Ensuring consumers can trust the safety of new foods is one of our most crucial responsibilities,” said the FSA’a chief scientific officer Robin May.
“The CCP 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.”
Due to a lack of comprehensive safety research and a degree of controversy around the products, few countries have made steps to approve CCPs.
Singapore is the only country to stock products containing lab-grown meat cells at the retail level, though even that is only available at one specialist store.
Some US states, including Florida, have moved to ban CCPs
Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis said in May that “Florida is fighting back against the global elite's plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs”.
"In the state of Florida we've put down the marker very clearly; we stand with agriculture. We stand with the cattle ranchers," he said.
Lab-grown products proved less controversial in the UK when Pets at Home-backed Meatly was approved to sell its cultivated chicken product as pet food.