Guidance: Cell-cultivated products: regulatory authorisation

Cell-cultivated products (CCPs) cover a variety of foods that can be made using a production process without slaughter or traditional farming and agricultural practices. Cells isolated from animals or plants, including cells from meat, seafood, fat and offal, or eggs, are grown in a controlled environment, and then harvested 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 topics. As we learn more, we will 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.