Ministry of Future Affairs
Investment follows time to market. And time to market is set by the regulatory pathway. That is Europe's real bottleneck — not the capital, not the consumer. The comfortable answer is that Singapore and the US simply move faster. That is less true than it was. Both have slowed. The window is open for Europe, but we have homework. First: tear down those national silos. Novel food authorisation is European, but driven by national political dynamics. It will only be solved by a deep understanding of what can be changed now, how, and what will take more time. Second, understand that the resistance to food innovation is culturally rooted - and how. Food systems change has been turned into a proxy war between natural and non-natural food. Third, the narrative. Think about what our narrative sounds like to the other side: no one wants to be replaced. And the industrial reality looks very different from the shiny pitch we make to investors. The good news: we can already do a lot without new legislation. But we need to be precise about which bottleneck is which.
Anna is the Managing Director and Founder of the Ministry of Future Affairs, a non-profit think and do tank, and of its advisory arm, Future Affairs Consulting. Working across Member States on novel foods, she developed the first framework for a pan-European regulatory sandbox together with senior regulatory experts. She is currently preparing the launch of the New Foods RegLab and focuses on advocacy around the EU Biotech Act package.