- Overview
- Background
- Updates
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.
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This was the first American focus group to research attitudes about cultured meat and cellular agriculture.
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The findings of this focus group are summarized in this video. The full report can be found here.
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After concluding this initiative, New Harvest decided against pursuing further consumer research. Consumer research is not neglected and is better supported by industry.
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.
See More Initiatives
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
Safety Roadmap for Cultured Meat
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. 50 leading 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.
2018-2019
Cell-Based Seafood
Cellular agriculture can be applied to seafood production to reduce our dependence on commercial fishing, which threatens the health of oceans and marine life.1 Why, then, is seafood so underexplored compared to land-based meat?
Prior to this initiative, no public literature explored marine applications of cellular agriculture. We consolidated all of the technical reasons why seafood is uniquely suited for cell culture into a peer-reviewed paper to advance further research about cell-based seafood.