Cell-cultivated products: Regulatory authorisation

Cell-cultivated products are foods made without slaughtering animals or using traditional farming and agricultural practices. To make them, you grow cells isolated from animals or plants, including cells from meat, seafood, fat, offal, or fertilised eggs are grown in a controlled environment, then harvest them to make a final food product. 

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) and Food Standards Scotland (FSS) are running the Cell-Cultivated Products Sandbox Programme from February 2025 to February 2027. Through this programme, we’re building our understanding of cell-cultivated products so we can produce guidance on a range of related. As we learn more, we’ll publish further guidance to help you understand how food regulations apply to your products. This may include updates to guidance we’ve already published.   

If you’re an innovative food business, you might not be familiar with the regulated products framework. This guidance explains how the framework’s requirements apply to cell-cultivated products, so you can understand and correctly apply them when producing cell-cultivated products, and make informed choices about their regulatory strategies.

This guidance is for anyone involved in producing cell-cultivated products from animal cells for human consumption. From this point on, we use ‘cell-cultivated products’ to mean only those made from animal cells.

This guidance applies to businesses based in:

• England and Wales, where the FSA is the food safety authority
• Scotland, where FSS is the food safety authority

This guidance does not apply to businesses based in Northern Ireland, which remains aligned with EU legislation.

This guidance reflects how the FSA and FSS interpret the legal requirements. It is not an authoritative interpretation of the law. It should be read together with the relevant legislation.    

You, as the food business operator, are responsible for complying with food law. This guidance cannot cover every scenario, so you should check the relevant legislation to understand how it applies to your circumstances. You do not have to follow the advice in this guidance if you can achieve compliance with the law in another way.

The proposal for dynamic alignment means that, subject to any exceptions agreed, the UK will align with all EU legislation within the expected scope of the agreement  and, once the agreement enters into force, rules applying in the UK would be updated in line with EU rules as they change over time. We will update this guidance to reflect any changes.

This guidance is accurate as at the date of publication. 

We review our guidance regularly to keep it up to date and relevant. We’ll review this guidance again by 30 2027. 

If you have feedback on this guidance, contact:  

• FSS at labellingstandardsandregulatedproducts@fss.scot
• FSA at regulatedproducts@food.gov.uk