According to the FDA, “Generally, domestic and foreign food facilities that are required to register with Sect. 415 of the Food, Drug, & Cosmetic Act must comply with the requirements for risk-based preventive controls mandated by the FDA FSMA as well as the modernized Current Good Manufacturing Practices of this rule ”. Traditionally, the conventional seafood industry is regulated by the FDA, except for catfish , which along with meat products are regulated by USDA. Cell-cultivated seafood production is considered a novel or alternative food production system. Thus, labeling is also an important part of the regulations for food products. Developing a common terminology to increase transparency is required for clean labeling. There was a comprehensive study for seafood products indicating that two “common or usual names,” “Cell-cultivated Seafood” and “Cell-Cultured Seafood,” met regulatory criteria. By displaying these two phrases on packages of frozen Atlantic Salmon, both “Cell-cultivated” and “Cell-Cultured” enabled participants to differentiate cell-cultivated seafood from “Farm-Raised” and “Wild-Caught” fish. There is a need to develop reliable test kits and rapid detection sensors to validate the safety of cell-cultivated seafood products. Testing methods are essential for assessing allergenicity in seafood products, blueberry packaging containers including those produced through cellular aquaculture. These methods need to encompass not only the cultured cells themselves but also the biomaterial scaffolds employed in the process. In silico assessments can determine sequence homologies and identify structural similarities of newly expressed proteins to existing allergenic examples while other testing methods approved by the EFSA and the FDA for allergenicity verification include the pepsin resistance test and immunochemical crossreactivity testing with Immunoglobulin E from the serum of allergic individuals.
Traceability of cell-cultivated seafood will also be a major topic as is the case with conventional meat products. The conventional seafood industry is highly fragmented with very little connection from the point of harvest to the point of consumption. In contrast, cell-cultivated seafood could be easily traced back to the source of production.One concern with cell-cultivated seafood is that in the future, by developing this novel food production system, the declining need for animals, including fish and crustacea, could negatively impact the fishing industry and the associated communities. However, cell-cultivated seafood is strategically positioned to complement traditional methods like wild-caught species and aquaculture farming, to support sustainability of these communities well into the future. Moreover, the capacity to harvest and culture cells from unconventional seafood sources provides new possibilities for these communities, simultaneously enriching food choices available to consumers. Figure 5 summarizes some of the benefits and challenges/ concerns associated with the cell-cultivated seafood industry.Businesses involved in cell-cultivated meat, including seafood, have been gaining significant importance across the globe, reflected in investments of about $2.8 billion since 2016 among 156 companies dedicated to cell-cultivated meat and seafood production. Cell cultivated seafood is an important niche within the cell cultivated protein sector with industrial investment of $896 million for cell-cultivated meat and seafood with many startups and established companies pursuing cell-cultivated seafoods in 2022. This includes companies in the US, Singapore; Europe; Canada; South Africa; Israel, South Korea, Hong Kong and India. The majority of companies are focused on business-to-consumer and business-to business , with fewer companies in the B2B business model space. Supply chain issues of cell-cultivated seafood will also need to be addressed as the market expands. The market potential for cell-cultivated seafood remains an unknown at the early stages, with price being one of the determinants.
Costs are expected to decrease with cheaper ingredients and with scaling, but this has to be demonstrated in the coming years .Cell-cultivated seafood as a technology offers a potentially transformative impact for foods of the future. This is based on the scientific tools now available, coupled with the features of the technology itself. For example, the potential to directly alter cell composition to provide healthier seafood products is compelling . This impact can be further enhanced pending the acceptability of GM-based approaches, where seafood cells can be bio-engineered to provide even further nutritional and perhaps even therapeutic benefits. Food safety can also be greatly enhanced, as shelf life, microbial community, tracking, and overall freshness can potentially be improved, along with a major reduction in antibiotic use. All of these potential benefits remain to be demonstrated as the field moves forward, but the underlying science to achieve such goals is already in place. In addition, improved food security, food access, novel foods and many other future outcomes can be anticipated. Nutrition – Omega-3s and other inputs – Although fish are recognized as one of the best sources of nutritionally-important long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, the source of these compounds is actually the marine algae, bacteria, and protists. Fish consume these organisms either directly or indirectly via other fish or zooplankton, thereby bio-accumulating omega-3 fats in their tissues. The fact that animal cells—including those of fish and aquatic invertebrates—are incapable of synthesizing omega-3 fats de novo means that producers of cell-cultivated seafood will need to acquire appropriate sources of omega-3 fatty acids as ingredients. These sources could include farming of microalgae, precision fermentation, plant molecular farming, or cell free systems. However, this latter strategy has not yet been explored for omega-3 production to our knowledge, and the former three strategies will still require substantial effort before they can be scaled to the levels that may be required to support the cell-cultivated seafood industry.
Cellular engineering approaches could also provide an opportunity to engineer fish cells to synthesize long-chain omega-3 fatty acids. Codon-optimized transgene expression of omega-3 desaturase gene of C. elegans in a fish cell culture and zebrafish model enhanced the conversion of n-6 PUFA to n-3 PUF. This study also illustrated that combined transgene expression of fat-1 and fat-2 enhanced the synthesis of n-3 PUFA. In addition, cellular engineering may provide a potential solution to enhance the accumulation and stability of omega-3 fats. These approaches may include the use of exogenous reactive oxygen scavengers in the media to promote cell proliferation and suppress oxidation processes, as well as genetic modifications to over-express antioxidant genes, such as superoxide dismutase . Furthermore, cellular engineering approaches also enable the design of media compositions to promote the synthesis of omega-3 fats. Other compounds with important impacts on nutrition and organoleptic properties of seafood are also ultimately derived from the diets of aquatic animals. This includes the carotenoid astaxanthin, which is responsible for the color of salmon and shrimp, as well as for protecting membrane lipids from oxidation. As is the case with omega-3 fats, astaxanthin and other compounds that are diet-derived in conventional seafood will need to either be sourced as ingredients for addition to cell cultivated seafood or synthesized by engineered cells. Notably, the U.S. government recently acknowledged the need to “bolster research into alternative feed ingredients for livestock and aquaculture, including plants, algae, or seaweeds, that can enhance or replace feed ingredients”. Marine-derived feed ingredients such as omega-3s and astaxanthin may be a shared need across both conventional and alternative protein production platforms.Cell-cultivated seafood is in its infancy. There is growing research among academic labs, and a growing corporate effort mainly among startup companies worldwide to tackle the increasing consumer demand for seafood. In these early stages, the focus is on cell sources, media optimization and scaffolding, while with time these efforts will mature into scaling production for impact. With scale, pricing will be reduced and availability will increase. The vision is that this emerging approach to cell-cultivated seafoods will offer safer and healthier alternatives for consumers, while enhancing environmental sustainability goals .For this growing industry to reach its potential, government support for research and commercialization efforts will be essential. A report by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office and the ClimateWorks Foundation estimated that annual global public spending on R&D and commercialization—including that of plant based proteins, precision fermentation, insects, blueberry packing boxes and cell cultivated meat—would need to increase to a total of US $10.1 billion to unlock the full benefits of alternative proteins. Whereas terrestrial cell-cultivated meat benefits from a strong foundation of biomedical tissue engineering research, and a fairly detailed understanding of mammalian and avian cell biology generally, this is less true for cell-cultivated seafood. Therefore, basic research aimed at understanding piscine and invertebrate cell types, differentiation processes, and metabolic requirements is still needed. Public funding of such research will reduce duplication of effort and provide a strong foundation for commercial efforts, thereby benefiting the field as a whole, everyday consumers, and the planet. Universal in this evolution to grow cell-cultivated seafood as a major option for alternative food for consumers around the world, safety, flavor and texture are paramount. Thus, regulations and methods to properly assess these new foods and to provide tracking will be a foundational need. In total, the potential for this emerging field to transform the seafood that we consume, while providing major benefits to sustainability, quality and food safety are expected to continue to drive the growth of this field. Both fishing and aquaculture already face major environmental challenges, and cell-cultivated seafood offers a new approach to address these issues, while also expanding our palates in ways never before possible. The future is exciting, but the path will need to be built upon a strong scientific foundation linked to consumer willingness to try these new foods and eventually to embrace them.
California has led the nation in farm sales since 1950, when Los Angeles County had more farm sales than any other county in the United States, largely because of specialization in the production of high-value fruit, nut and vegetable crops. California’s farm sales in 2015 were $47 billion, including $18 billion from the sale of fruits and nuts, $9 billion from vegetables and melons, and $5 billion from horticultural specialties such as floriculture, nurseries and mushrooms. That is, $32 billion, or two-thirds, of farm sales were from these FVH crops. The leading farm counties, Tulare, Kern and Fresno, each had farm sales of almost $7 billion in 2015 . The production of many fruits and vegetables is labor-intensive, meaning that labor represents 20% to 40% of production costs for table grapes, strawberries and other commodities. Average employment of 421,300 farmworkers in 2015 represents 12 monthly snapshots of persons on the payroll during the pay period that includes the 12th of the month. However, total wages of $12.8 billion are all wages paid to all workers, including those who were employed at other times during the month and those who earned wages from non-farm employers. A worker who was employed 2,080 hours — the number of hours California’s Employment Development Department considers full-time and full-year employment — would earn an average annual pay of $30,300, which prompted the Los Angeles Times to ask why, despite implied hourly wages of almost $15 per hour, U.S.-born workers reject farm jobs . The answer is that few farmworkers are employed year-round; many are employed fewer than 2,080 hours a year. In 2015, the average earnings of all workers with at least one farm job was $20,500. EDD does not collect hours of work data from employers who are paying unemployment insurance taxes, but does collect the earnings and employment data that we use in this article. The National Agricultural Workers Survey collects hours of work data from California crop workers, and found that they were employed an average of 47 hours during the week before they were interviewed in 2015–16. American Community Survey data, also collected from workers, shows that both crop and livestock workers were employed slightly more than 40 hours a week. The NAWS and ACS do not collect data on annual hours worked. However, if workers averaged more than 40 hours a week over 52 weeks, average hourly earnings would be lower than $15. Non-supervisory production workers do most of the work on the state’s largest farms that produce labor intensive FVH crops. About 90% of California crop workers were born in Mexico, and 60% are unauthorized, according to the NAWS, which is 10 percentage points higher than the U.S. average of 50% unauthorized crop workers . The reason for more unauthorized workers in California is that it has a higher share of foreign-born workers: most foreign born workers are unauthorized, and California’s 90% share of foreign-born crop workers exceeds the 60% foreign-born share in the rest of the United States. The dominance of labor-intensive crops in California, and the Trump administration’s efforts to step up border and interior enforcement, has increased interest in the availability of farmworkers.