- Overview
- Background
- Updates
Overview
The Cultured Meat Safety Initiative (CMSI) is a joint initiative between New Harvest and Vireo Advisors aiming to address critical technical, methodological, and informational challenges related to evaluating the safety of cultured meat (CM) products.
CMSI involves the convening of diverse stakeholders, including industry, governmental scientists, regulators, academic researchers, and others. Gaining such varied perspectives advances public knowledge and the practice of food safety for CM products by identifying and addressing data gaps. Research conducted to develop data and methods build the necessary support elements for the emerging ecosystem, which can raise regulatory and consumer confidence, support industry efforts toward commercialization, and improve the efficacy of evaluation processes of regulatory safety reviews.
Building on progress from Phase I and Phase II of CMSI, New Harvest and Vireo Advisors are now working to convene diverse stakeholders to create the infrastructure for shared knowledge, methods, and data that address the priorities identified in Phase I and II. Our long-term goal is to coordinate and launch regional efforts to develop and validate analytical methods for CM safety analysis and use these methods to generate datasets that can be made publicly available to support transparent food risk assessments and policy-making processes.
01
87 people from 50 cultured meat companies and 48 governmental scientists and regulators from 15 jurisdictions around the world have identified the top priorities for safety methods, data, and research needed for cultured meat products to reach commercial markets.
02
Now, we aim to convene diverse stakeholders to create the infrastructure for shared knowledge, methods, and data that address the priorities identified.
03
The first step is to convene diverse stakeholders to discuss the findings to date and facilitate discussion on how to address the priorities. A series of working sessions are being held throughout 2024 - 2025 on Developing an Action Plan for Cultured Meat Safety Research. Learn more and apply for a working session here.
Updates
April 2025 – A workshop will be held in Chicago, Illinois, Co-located with the Future of Protein Chicago. Learn more and apply here.
March 2025 – A workshop will be held in Davis, California, in collaboration with the UC Davis Integrative Center for Alternative Meat and Protein (iCAMP). Learn more and apply here.
December 2024 – A workshop will be held in Austin, Texas, Co-sponsored by and co-located with the Society for Risk Analysis Annual Meeting. Learn more and apply here.
January 2024 – The first workshop was held in collaboration with the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture (TUCCA) on January 12, 2024. Read the report here.
Reach out to Bre (breanna@new-harvest.org) if you are interested in joining the initiative or participating in a future workshop.
Collaborators
This initiative was conceived of and is carried out in partnership with Vireo Advisors, an expert advisory consultancy focused on the safe and sustainable commercialization of new technologies.
Our first workshop was in collaboration with the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture. Support for future workshops is provided by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), The Society for Risk Analysis (SRA), and the University of California Davis Integrative Center for Alternative Meat and Protein (iCAMP).
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