Ad Hoc meeting with industry representatives

Background

On 18 October 2023, EFSA met with delegates from three registered stakeholder organisations - Cellular Agriculture Europe, EuropaBio and Food Fermentation Europe - in the context of an ad hoc meeting with industry representatives. 

Following discussions initiated during EFSA’s Scientific Colloquium 27 “Cell culture-derived foods and food ingredients”, the meeting aimed to facilitate an exchange of views on the novelties and challenges for the risk assessment of cell culture-derived foods and food ingredients as novel foods.

The meeting provided an opportunity to address and discuss the following topics with the industry representatives:

1. The scope and membership of the three EFSA registered stakeholder organisations.
2. Feedback from EFSA’s Scientific Colloquium, including a discussion of the inputs received from participants and consideration on their potential integration into EFSA’s risk assessment.
3. Case studies on recent EFSA risk assessment activities in the area of cell cultured-derived food and food ingredients. EFSA shared its experience and learnings from the assessment of Apple fruit cell culture biomass and Human-identical milk oligosaccharides. 
4. Stakeholder organisations’ experience with the preparation of novel foods dossiers. Each stakeholder organisation provided comments on the current EFSA Novel foods Guidance Document, proposing areas for clarification or further development.
5. Administrative and technical support to applicants. The stakeholder organisations highlighted the burden posed to applicants by the current administrative procedures for the authorization of novel foods and noted the need for additional support beyond the current general pre-submission advice. Acknowledging the requests, EFSA provided an overview of recent additional activities to support applicants throughout the entire lifecycle of applications.
6. An update of the EFSA Novel foods Guidance Document. EFSA informed the participants about the expected activities and the related timelines, including further opportunities for engagement. The Guidance Document is expected to be finalised by June 2024 with a public consultation planned for early 2024.

Fruitful exchanges took place on all the topics. EFSA thanks all participants for the constructive discussions and excellent collaboration.