Review of Analytical Methods for Cell Cultivated Products

Cell Cultivated Products (CCPs) represent an emerging class of novel foods produced through the culture and differentiation of animal or plant cells which includes cells from meat, seafood, fat and offal, offering potential benefits in sustainability, animal welfare, and food system resilience. As these products progress toward commercialisation, there is a growing need to understand how analytical methods can be applied to verify their authenticity, detect adulteration, and support effective regulatory oversight. This project focused on animal-derived CCPs, providing a comprehensive landscape review of current and emerging analytical methods with potential applicability to CCP detection and traceability, combined with an extensive programme of stakeholder engagement across industry, government, academia and the analytical community. The review highlighted that no single analytical approach is currently sufficient to characterise or authenticate CCPs due to their inherent variability, evolving production methods, and similarity to conventional meat. Instead, a weight of evidence (WoE) framework drawing on genomics, proteomics, chromatography, spectroscopy, structural analysis and digital tools shows the greatest promise for analytical detection of CCPs. The work also identified major challenges including a lack of validated methods, limited reference materials, confidentiality barriers, and cost or accessibility constraints, which currently hinder the development of robust analytical testing strategies. Stakeholder insights reaffirmed the need for harmonised standards, inter-laboratory studies, well-characterised datasets, and rapid, cost-effective screening tools to complement advanced laboratory methods. The project concluded that early establishment of metrological principles, traceability systems, regulatory clarity, and strong collaboration across sectors will be essential to maintain consumer confidence and ensure CCP integrity as the market expands. In order of priority, this report recommended further work be conducted on weight of evidence approaches, digital barcoding, epigenetics and microbial profiling, as approaches which may have the greatest potential for analytical CCP traceability. Overall, this work provided an evidence-based foundation to guide future method development, support regulatory preparedness, and inform a coherent national approach to CCP authenticity testing.