Concerns around food safety and scalability have surfaced since the successful launch of cultivated meat products in the U.S. For example, a spring 2023 Wall Street Journal article1 noted that cultivated meat makers are in a "battle against bacteria." Safety is, of course, paramount, and U.S. food regulators have collaborated with academics, global food regulators, and cultivated meat developers to establish an approach to safety within the existing regulatory framework—all with an eye toward ensuring that foods developed through cell culture technology are safe and wholesome.
Indeed, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service (USDA's FSIS), the food regulators charged with overseeing the safety of the American food supply, developed a Formal Agreement2 in 2019 to leverage their respective expertise as provided for under existing federal statutes covering food safety. This article summarizes recent regulatory developments that provide insight on how the current U.S. regulatory framework addresses food safety within the cultivated meat space.