Alt meat’s slow progress: Who’s to blame, government or business?

The food and drink industry must stop lobbying only for its own needs and support raising regulatory gatekeepers’ funding to speed up the pace of the frustrating bureaucracy faced when getting a product to market.

Slow progress was causing innovation problems and shifting business's focus from meeting needs to meeting requirements.

“For plant-based and other upcoming industries it can be a challenge to [develop products] because what I’m always afraid of is developing towards what is allowed, instead of developing the optimum and I think regulators in this field should be aware of that,” said Respectfarms co-founder Ira Van Elen at the Future Food Tech event in London.

How to make food approval quicker?

Paired with that, there was a need for different regions to be better aligned or for a central resource to create the pathways for definition “and have data for all regions on what legislation covers”, said RSSL business development manager Ben Price.

Though that was easier said than done, pointed out Solar Foods head of global regulatory affairs Ida Søndergaard.

“There is a huge [regulatory] difference between different markets”, she said. “The EU framework makes it easy, but the legislative challenges in the EU are difficult with huge timelines and then years to get it on the market.”

Engagement from authorities was essential in making things move quicker, she added, saying Singapore’s food and drink regulators ensured all parties were involved in the same meeting, which helped with approvals.

Though the issue of resource, understanding and how quickly the food tech space is moving was a big barrier to overcome, stressed the UK Food Standards Agency’s head of policy priorities Joshua Ravenhill.

“It’s [the alternative-protein market] going to be massive for the FSA. It’s not for us to educate consumers on what cultivated is,” he said. “Our approach to novel food is we don’t think we need to change the framework inherited from the EU, we need to understand how to improve safety, not make legislative change.”

More funding for food regulators

Yet this would only happen if the whole industry, including those around it, such as the regulators, understood and agreed what the goal was, said Van Elen.

“Why don’t people in the industry lobby for more resource for regulators to make things go faster, because we are having to make things faster. There’s food security, but also a burning [fast] platform [of new tech],” she said.

Lobbying for more regulator funding would help, said Ravenhill, and not just for quicker approval.

“It will help to join the dots between different government departments and build as much data as possible to show how novel foods will align with [the overall goal]. Industry can help us get the data and information about why regulators need to have more funding.”