EU food safety agency says it needs faster, AI-enabled reviews for cultivated meat and other novel foods

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) says the EU must strengthen its scientific readiness for novel foods such as cultivated meat and precision fermentation, and proposes moving to a "human-led, AI-enabled" way of assessing them, Green Queen reports.

In a paper in the EFSA Journal meant to inform its future strategy, the agency calls for "faster and fit-for-purpose risk assessments" and admits it "remains largely document-centred", with opinions, data sets, models and reasoning stored as separate pieces. That, it says, limits reuse, slows assessments and increases manual work. Its target is an end-to-end AI-supported environment in which incoming mandates and dossier material are converted into structured data.

The paper names cultivated meat and precision fermentation among its priority scientific areas for sustainable food and feed innovation, and says EFSA needs to build its own specialist expertise rather than respond to applications only as companies file them. It notes that its updated novel food guidance sets out high-level requirements but not an exhaustive list of what a risk assessment needs.

The delays are real. On paper an EU novel food authorisation should take about 18 months: a 30-day suitability check, a scientific opinion of nine months or more, and a seven-month legal stage in which 55% of member states must approve the Commission's draft. In practice the average is 30 months and can stretch to five years, against 12 to 24 months in Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, according to the report.

The Good Food Institute welcomed the paper and said it strengthens the case for including novel foods in the EU's regulatory sandboxes, which the Commission proposed to exclude under the Biotech Act. "Regulatory sandboxes would be a particularly powerful tool to boost regulatory preparedness," said Lea Seyfarth, policy manager at GFI Europe. Food industry groups, members of the European Parliament's environment and food safety committee and Germany and the Netherlands have also asked for the exclusion to be dropped. The report is by Anay Mridul.

Photo: Laura garimberti / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Source: Green Queen