The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has highlighted a need to sustain scientific expertise to keep pace with emerging innovations such as cultivated meat and precision fermentation.

A new paper intended to inform EFSA’s future strategy outlines the scientific developments necessary to ensure they are prepared for new food innovations and can carry out faster risk assessments that adhere to Europe’s robust food safety requirements, rather than responding to authorisation requests for new products as companies make them. 

EFSA is responsible for conducting rigorous assessments of the safety and nutritional value of new foods before they can be sold in the EU, but a lack of clarity about the type of data companies need to provide has led to lengthy authorisation delays.

The paper names cultivated meat and precision fermentation among the key “priority scientific areas for sustainable food/feed innovation”, where there is a need for “faster and fit-for-purpose” risk assessments.

It added that the updated EFSA Guidance on Novel Foods outlines the “high-level scientific requirements” companies need to provide in safety dossiers when applying for authorisations, but acknowledges that the guidance does not provide an exhaustive list of all elements required for risk assessments. 

The paper stated that EFSA needed to build its own specialist expertise to ensure that risk assessments are carried out efficiently and to address a lack of open-access information about rapidly developing food innovations.

Nonprofit think tank the Good Food Institute Europe (GFI Europe) has welcomed EFSA’s recognition of the need to sustain its scientific excellence. It said that the issues highlighted in the report demonstrate the need for novel foods to be included in regulatory sandboxes – controlled and time-limited environments that can expand expertise about emerging innovations.

Sandboxes enable authorities and regulators to build a better understanding of new production processes and are particularly useful for alternative proteins, where food safety authorities may be assessing these products for the first time. 

The European Commission proposed excluding novel foods from a sandbox scheme introduced under the first Biotech Act last year, but there is an opportunity for this decision to be overturned as discussions in the Parliament and Council of the EU continue. MEPs on the Committee on the Environment, Climate and Food Safety (ENVI) have said the blanket exclusion needs to be removed, while member states such as Germany and the Netherlands have called for a rethink.

Lea Seyfarth, Policy Manager at GFI Europe, said: “EFSA’s food safety assessment processes are among the most robust in the world, and it’s positive to see the agency acknowledge the need to keep pace with innovation and develop a more proactive system that avoids unnecessary delays. 

“Regulatory sandboxes would be a particularly powerful tool to boost regulatory preparedness and learn about new food innovations. In order to build a future-proof regulatory system, EU policymakers must look at the evidence and reverse the Commission’s proposal to exclude novel foods from the Biotech Act’s sandbox scheme.”