“There is an enormously bright future for precision fermentation and cellular agriculture; the efficiencies alone make that true,” Bill Liao, general partner at global VC fund SOSV, explained at the Food Tech Congress in Warsaw [recently].
But with a global shortage of bioreactors and expertise, regulatory and IP challenges, he warned, “The road ahead is much tougher than it was.”
As for the regulatory path forward, he said, “So many countries are way behind on their regulatory processes for food, especially these kinds of [cellular ag] foods, which is usually down to stupid food protectionism.”
“Singapore is desperate for food security so they have some of the most avant-garde laws in the world. But food protectionism in Europe has been around for a very long time.”
In the EU, meanwhile, there is still a lot of investment in cellular agriculture, despite the region’s “near-total and nonsensical ban” of GMO foods and Italy’s recent move to ban cultivated meat, both of which defy global efforts to ensure food security, said Liao.
