The first part of the EU’s Biotech Act has been published. The act, which is mainly focused on health, also touches on food innovation and the regulation around novel foods.
Overall, it’s a mixed bag. On the one hand, the act increases novel food pre-submission interactions between the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the applicant. On the other, novel foods are explicitly cut out of planned regulatory sandboxes for new biotech products.
The EU’s novel food approval process is known for two things: first, the stringency and high quality of its assessments, and secondly, the fact they can take a long, long time.
While this first aspect is enough to make EFSA’s approval a desirable accreditation for any start-up, it also means approval is a costly and time-consuming process. Because EFSA takes so long to approve novel foods, investors have been reluctant to embrace areas that rely heavily on these approvals, such as cultivated meat.
