Led by Dr. Kimberly Ong, Vireo Advisors in collaboration with New Harvest, IFF, and Mosa Meat have published a landmark publication reviewing the state of the science in safety of cell cultured meat and seafood products. As an initial step toward a thorough demonstration of safety, this review identifies hazards that could be introduced during manufacturing, evaluates applicability of existing safety assessment approaches, and highlights research priorities that could support safe commercialization.

We are proud to present our findings to:

• Support industry in the development of safe cell cultured meat and seafood products;

• Serve as a reference for regulators to understand potential hazards; and,

• Provide recommendations on key areas of research to guide future safety studies aimed at filling data gaps.

In 2020, Vireo and New Harvest held a series of virtual workshops in a safety initiative, bringing together participants from 50 cultured meat and seafood companies to co-develop a modular manufacturing process diagram portraying the majority of manufacturing processes currently in development. Industry experts, academic researchers, and government representatives were consulted to identify potential hazards associated with the manufacture of cell cultured meat and seafood. Most hazards are not expected to be novel; therefore, safety assessment methods from a range of fields, such as conventional and novel foods, foods produced from biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, etc. are likely to be applicable. However, additional assessment of novel inputs or products with significant differences from existing foods may be necessary. A lack of publicly available safety data may hamper commercialization efforts, therefore further research on the safety of the inputs and associated residues, potential for contamination, and development of standardized safety assessment approaches (particularly animal-free methods) is recommended.

We hope that this Safety Initiative serves as a model for future collaborative work amongst the industry and stakeholders, and that we continue to chart a path forward to demonstrate the safety of cell culture meat and seafood.

The peer-reviewed research is available in Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety, a journal of the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) and is published as an open-access article. The publication was authored by Kimberly J. Ong (Vireo), Jeremiah Johnston (New Harvest), Isha Datar (New Harvest), Vincent Sewalt (IFF), Dwayne Holmes (Mosa Meat), and Jo Anne Shatkin (Vireo), and was supported by many other contributors – a full list can be found in Appendix 1 of the paper.