Cell-cultivated meat could be on sale in the UK within a few years, the food regulator has said, with applications for lab-grown steak, beef, chicken and foie gras already submitted, while another 15 applications are expected in the next two years.

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) was awarded £1.6m of government funding on Tuesday to develop an efficient safety assessment process for the novel foods. It said the UK was an attractive market as it had a high number of vegans, vegetarians and flexitarians, a higher openness to new foods than many other European countries and a large financial sector to back startup companies.

Cultivated meat is produced by growing cells and does not require the raising or slaughter of animals. Cultivated chicken was approved for sale to consumers in Singapore in 2020 and in the US in 2023 and cultivated steak was approved in Israel in 2024. Scores of companies around the world are developing similar products, including using pork and fish.

The rearing of livestock is a major cause of climate-heating emissions and the destruction of nature. Cultivated meat requires far less land and water to produce and avoids animal welfare issues.

While cultivated meat had the same cells as slaughtered meat, ensuring it was safe for human consumption was still vital, said Prof Robin May, the chief scientific adviser at the FSA. “Companies are obviously aiming for products indistinguishable from the animal equivalent, but the way they are achieving that is fundamentally different.”

The cells are grown in a liquid and prompted to develop into muscle, blood and fat tissue. “You do that typically with a very complex cocktail of growth media and growth factors,” he said. “Are they all safe? Because there might be some left in the final product. Also, are there any genetic changes in the cells that might make them in some way hazardous?”

But May said the developments were exciting: “There is lots of potential here for all sorts of benefits in terms of welfare, sustainability, health, and just consumer choice.”

The FSA’s project to develop the assessment criteria will take two years and involve discussion with academic experts and the companies. This is intended to lead to an efficient approval process being established that would be expected to take companies two years to complete. However, applications already submitted to the FSA are being analysed currently.

The project is the first of its type outside South Korea. “Many of the techniques used to create cell-cultivated products have been used to create cell-cultivated medicines previously,” said May. “So for us, it’s a huge advantage to be able to draw on that massive amount of evidence.”

He said the FSA was sometimes criticised for delays in coming to decisions over new foods: “[But] the most important thing is that the food you buy is food you can trust. So I think people expect us to go as far as we possibly can in terms of establishing food safety.” Cultivated meat companies say it is safer in important respects than traditional meat, as it avoids contamination with farm bacteria such as E coli and salmonella, and the antibiotics given to many farm animals.

Linus Pardoe at the Good Food Institute Europe, which supports the development of cultivated meat, said: “The new government clearly wants to capitalise on the strong investments made in British cultivated meat over recent years by bringing products to market in a way that upholds the UK’s gold standard safety regulations. But to fully realise the potential of cultivated meat, ministers must also provide a long-term boost to the FSA’s budget, enabling it to complete robust risk assessments within statutory timeframes.”

In July, the UK became the first country in Europe to approve cultivated meat for use in pet food, after Meatly’s chicken was approved by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Animal and Plant Health Agency.

Italy and two US states have banned the sale of cultivated meat. In May, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, said: “Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish.”