Consumer Perception of Cellular Agriculture

Conducting the first American focus group study to assess attitudes about cultured meat

2016 - 2017

Overview

Consumer acceptance is key to realizing the potential benefits of cellular agriculture.

New Harvest, in partnership with the Environmental Law Institute, assembled the first American focus group to understand public attitudes about cellular agriculture and cultured meat. The two focus groups interviewed as part of this initiative provide an important qualitative perspective on how the public weighs the potential benefits and risks of cultured meat and cellular agriculture.

Updates

January, 2017 – Key findings are published in a report, Perceptions on Cellular Agriculture: Key Findings from Qualitative Research, by Hart Research Associates. Key findings are also summarized in a short video.

December, 2016 – New Harvest publishes a blog post about this initiative.

December, 2016 – Focus groups are conducted in Baltimore, Maryland. Hart Research Associates administers the focus groups using this template script. The focus groups yield a transcript from non-college-educated adults (focus group #1) and a transcript from college-educated adults (focus group #2).

November, 2016 – Environmental Law Institute (ELI) publishes a press release announcing the initiative.

Collaborators

This initiative was developed in partnership with David Rejeski at the Environmental Law Institute.

The focus groups were conducted by Hart Research, a firm with specific expertise in conducting public opinion research.

The project was supported by the Richard Lounsbery Foundation.

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2022 - Present

CMSI Phase II: International Regulatory and Government Perspectives

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 of the Cultured Meat Safety Initiative (CMSI), New Harvest and Vireo Advisors convened governmental scientists and regulators from 15 jurisdictions around the world to identify governmental priorities for the safety methods, data, and research needed to support safety evaluation of cultured meat products to reach commercial markets worldwide.

2020 - PRESENT

The New Harvest OpenCellAg Repository

In order to see our vision of a more just, equitable, and humane food system one of our key strategies is to default to open. By creating an open cellular agriculture repository on Zenodo we ensure that the research produced by New Harvest and other researchers is accessible for all to use, read, share, and build upon. In that way we are increasing the impact of this crucial knowledge by furthering its reach.

2020 - Present

CMSI Phase I: Safety Roadmap for Cultured Meat

The Cultured Meat Safety Initiative (CMSI), 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).

This involves the convening of diverse stakeholders, including industry, governmental scientists, regulators, academic researchers, and consumers. 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 evaluation processes of regulatory safety reviews.

Because growing meat through cell culture is so novel a process, many questions about the safety of cell-cultured meat and seafood products remain unanswered.

This industry-wide initiative was designed in partnership with Vireo Advisors to begin a data-driven conversation about the safety of cultured meat.

Fifty cultured meat companies shared previously unpublished details about their manufacturing processes which we used to create a body of publicly available information about how cultured meat is produced and what safety hazards might be introduced along the way.