The 6th Singapore Food Agency Roundtable on Novel Food Regulations was held on the 3rd of November 2025, as part of Singapore AgriFood Week, an annual event attracting 14,000+ participants from all over the world. Dr Olivia Ogilvie of Opo Bio Aotearoa was one of the 300 people participating in the roundtable. Below is a brief summary of Dr Ogilvie’s notes from the event, providing key NZ-relevant insights into the fast-evolving global regulatory landscape that governs cellular agriculture. Common topics of discussion across the sessions included: the lack of institutional knowledge in emerging food companies around creating safe food products and assembling approval dossiers; the need for international alignment of novel food safety risk management and testing; and the importance of understanding the allergenicity of novel foods (allergens could be known or novel).
Fireside chat: Navigating the path to commercialisation
[Regulatory approval of Vow Foods in Australia−New Zealand by FSANZ and Singapore by SFA.]
This session was led by Mr Andrew Janis of Vow, Dr Nick Fletcher of FSANZ, and Dr How Chee Ong of SFA. It focused on the regulatory similarities, differences and coordination/harmonisation between the Singapore and Australia-New Zealand jurisdictions on developing novel food pathways for Vow’s cultivated quail product. SFA is the most advanced jurisdiction for novel food approvals, with an iterative framework that examines inputs and manufacturing processes, as well as endpoint testing. FSANZ has taken a similar approach, guided by the three aims of protecting public health and safety, providing information to consumers, and preventing misleading conduct. Both agencies use rigorous scientific analysis methods when testing novel food safety. The speakers noted that the global variation in regulatory pathways affects the ability of companies to commercialise novel food products, with Vow targeting ANZ and SG due to high levels of regulatory overlap and cooperation between FSANZ and SFA.
Key Insights:
- Safety first!: safety must be central to the development process of novel foods (incl. cellular agriculture); approval should be a third-party certification of safely designed products, with product safety strongly backed by quantitative data at all development stages.
- Importance of cross-agency cooperation: cross-agency collaboration helps ensure novel foods are safe and nutritious, which includes working groups between agencies, ongoing dialogue, and where possible, direct sharing and discussion of company data between regulators.
- Timing is key: manufacturing process must be sufficiently mature before submitting a dossier for approval, as further modifications to the process could negatively impact the approval process (an inherent tension between regulation and the rapid changes that take place within a startup).
- Maintain commercial viability: companies must be upfront with their investors regarding the time, unpredictability, and associated costs involved in bringing products to market, particularly if undergoing approvals in multiple jurisdictions that may have divergent regulatory regimes.
Role of academia in the novel food ecosystem and Support from industry partners
[Two sessions covering experiences of participants in the well-established Singaporean novel food ecosystem.]
These two sessions were led by Prof Zhou Weibiao of NUS and Samson Lee of Nurasa. In the first session, Prof Weibiao discussed the work being done since 2024 by the Bezos Centre for Sustainable Protein at the National University of Singapore to produce high-quality, affordable and sustainable microbial proteins from microalgae and biomass fermentation that can be further developed into cultured meat and plant-based protein hybrids. The center’s research is structured around six pillars: macroalgae and fermentation, plant-based protein, cell-cultivated meat (vertical pillars), and nutrition, risk assessment and toxicology (horizontal pillars). Lee discussed the role of Nurasa within the Singaporean food ecosystem. Nurasa is a Singapore-based food platform company supporting the regional scale-up and commercialisation of new food technologies. Nurasa supports companies seeking regulatory approval in Singapore and beyond, collaborating with regulatory partners and the Fresh and Future Ready Food Safety Hub for technical dossier writing, data requirements, and coordination of the submission process.
Key Insights:
- Lack of NZ food strategy: Despite Aotearoa NZ being a global leader in food production, we do not have a national strategy for food innovation and are therefore missing out on global funding opportunities (e.g. the Bezos grants), important for both research opportunities and commercial initiatives.
- Importance of local industry collaboration: a novel food ecosystem thrives when companies have easy access to technical, scale-up, regulatory, and go-to-market services.
- Unique barriers to market: novel food producers face the same challenges around brand development faced by traditional agribusiness producers, but face additional challenges around regulatory compliance and consumer acceptance.
Updates on Novel Food Regulation in UK
[The UK Food Standards Agency’s new regulatory sandbox for cell-cultivated products.]
Daniel Lloyd discussed the UK’s management of novel foods through their new regulatory sandbox. They aim to gather information from industry participants via workshops, academic input, and engagement with other regulators to accomplish various aims. These aims include: providing scientific resources for assessing the safety attributes of cell-culture products to generate the data required for regulatory approval dossiers; publishing positions on key regulatory questions (e.g. product labelling, guidance for tasting events); establishing business support for local cellular agriculture industry; creating regulator networks at both national and international levels to address regulation issues and share information; contributing to international standards (e.g. through Codex Alimentarius); and progressing at least two industry applications through the agency’s risk assessment framework.
Key Insights:
- Sandbox benefits: by bringing together industry participants, aims to provide scientific, regulatory, and communication assistance to local industry.
- Sandbox limitations: The agency is unable to fast-track approvals or implement legislation – they ‘fast-track knowledge, not products’.
- Sandbox challenges: include developing regulatory routes for products with multiple novel aspects (e.g. GMOs, cell-cultured products as flavours), as well as creating various technical definitions (e.g. product ‘batch’).
Novel food regulations in China
Dr Wang Jun from from the China Food Safety Authority discussed the regulatory status of novel foods, specifically cultivated meat in China. Jun stated that China’s attitude towards novel and cultivated foods is open, and they are in the process of building a suitable framework. In the Chinese context, novel foods are considered to be foods that are outside of local traditional dietary custom, where the latter are defined as foods with a history of production and sale for at least 30 years within a provincial-level administrative region, as prepackaged or non-prepackaged food, and that are excluded from the Pharmacopoeia of China. China has approved many alternative proteins for food production, but has not yet received applications for cultivated products.
Key Insights:
- Shifting regulatory focus: In China, the regulatory focus has shifted from final product approvals to ingredient-based approvals; for novel foods, the food safety method used is substantial equivalence.
- Export documentation requirements for imports: applicants must provide certification materials from the exporting country or region that permit production or sale, as well as certification materials confirming the manufacturer has passed inspection or certification; NZ currently does not have specific legal mechanisms to certify cultivated products for export.
Future outlook of novel food safety assessment
This panel session was hosted by Dr Masami Takeuchi of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, Mirte Gosker of the Good Food Institute, and Prof Zhou Weibiao from the National University of Singapore. They explored collaborative strategies to address knowledge gaps and ensure robust, non-conservative safety assessments for novel foods. They emphasised the need for developing, validating and aligning new methodologies, accelerating safety framework development and maintaining consumer confidence, while also ensuring inclusivity for low and middle-income countries.
Key Insights:
- Alignment vs harmonisation: methodologies for assessing novel foods should be gently aligned through international initiatives like Codex Alimentarius, the Asia-Pacific Regulatory Forum, and the Cultured Food Safety Initiative; it is important to build an evidence-based global consensus around the definition of a safe novel food, particularly for precision fermentation and cell-culture products.
- Need for quicker screening: safety evaluation depends on methodology, which is time-consuming and costly; academia can develop new tools for rapidly assessing the risk profile of novel foods (e.g. AI-related modelling).