Biotechnology holds part of the key to enabling a transformation of our economy and our food systems. While in the past, we have mainly focused on offering farmers sustainable alternatives to chemical pesticides and food waste reduction, for instance by extending the shelf-life of products, the current innovative biotechnological solutions are offering society at large the possibility to shift to a more sustainable diet by providing plant-based proteins as an alternative to animal-based ones.
Despite growing public interest and emerging companies in this field, the lengthy pre-market authorisation process has led to a situation where no companies have applied for cultivated meat products approval in Europe.
The situation is different in the US, where the Food and Drug Administration recently approved the use of cultivated meat produced from chickens’ living cells for human consumption, paving the way to a new environmentally friendly diet. In this regard, the US follows the example of Singapore, which was the first country in the world to introduce cultivated meat to consumers. Unfortunately, Europe is still a few years away from seeing such sustainable alternatives to meat being offered in the supermarkets.
