Developing an action plan for collaborative research on cultured meat and seafood safety: March 2025 working session
Outcomes from a March 2025 workshop with industry and academia stakeholders
March 12, 2025, San Francisco, California
With in-kind support from Wildtype and the University of California Davis Integrative Center for Alternative Meat and Protein (iCAMP) during the week of Future Food-Tech San Francisco (March 13-14). Thank you to everyone who joined!
Breanna Duffy, Wei Ng, Julia Marschallinger, Kimberly Ong, Jo Anne Shatkin
New Harvest and Vireo Advisors hosted a third working session focused on identifying actionable steps for pre-competitive and collaborative research on cultured meat and seafood (CM) safety in San Francisco, CA on March 12, 2025. This session is part of a larger series of working sessions under the Cultured Meat Safety Initiative (CMSI). The CMSI seeks to address the critical technical, methodological, and informational issues related to evaluating the safety of CM products. We previously outlined safety priorities in collaboration with industry and governmental stakeholders.
This series aims to address these priorities by convening stakeholders to collaborate on research, methods development, and creating shared resources. Previous sessions took place in January 2024 at Tufts University and December 2024 in Austin, Texas.
The working session engaged 41 participants from 14 countries and 33 organizations, including research universities, CM companies, and B2B ingredient suppliers. The session, conducted under Chatham House Rule, encouraged open discussion. Participants progressively refined safety research topics into specific, actionable research plans throughout the day. The session began with brainstorming and project pitches, followed by 2 rounds of breakout discussions on topics selected by participant voting. Breakout discussions developed specific safety research questions, potential challenges, and resources needed. Group discussions allowed participants to synthesize insights and build a shared understanding with concrete next steps to address these safety priorities.
This workshop was part of CMSI Phase III: Precompetitive Collaboration on Safety Research & Methods Development.
