KANSAS CITY — On July 1, Florida banned the production and marketing of cell-cultured meat, also known as cultivated meat. Alabama is set to enact similar legislation Oct. 1, and the governor of Nebraska recently said he will work with state lawmakers to ban products produced using the technology.

The initiatives may seem like a setback to the very early stage cultivated meat industry, but each really demonstrates its promise and the threat it is perceived to pose to the conventional livestock and poultry industries.

The Florida and Alabama proposals were presented as protecting consumers in each state by prohibiting the manufacture and sale of cultivated meat. What consumers are being protected from is unclear, because federal regulators have been studying cultivated meat and found no food safety issues. More than a year before the Florida legislation was passed, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in June 2023 issued grants of inspection to two companies for the sale of cultivated chicken in the United States.

The USDA and the Food and Drug Administration published a formal agreement in 2019 to create a joint regulatory framework for cultivated meat product approval. The agreement encompasses the entire development and manufacturing process and considers the cell collection, cell culturing, processing, packaging and labeling. One goal of the agreement is to ensure the regulation of cultivated meat safety and marketing is as rigorous as it is for other food and beverages.

There also is little chance consumers today may purchase mislabeled or even deceptively labeled cultivated meat, because no products are available at retail or foodservice in the United States. The two companies that received grants of inspection to sell cultivated meat in 2023 briefly sold products at two restaurants, but they were later removed from the menus.

Additionally, what makes legislation to ban cultivated meat in some US states truly strange is the industry today is more concept than reality. Optimized manufacturing processes are being developed, some of the equipment needed to make products at scale needs to be invented, a manufacturing infrastructure doesn’t really exist, and product testing with large groups of consumers hasn’t occurred.

With such facts in mind, it is appropriate to return to the question of what consumers in Florida, soon in Alabama and perhaps elsewhere are being protected from? The answer is this isn’t a consumer protection issue, but about protecting livestock producers from a technological breakthrough that may one day grow into a threat.

Even though the manufacturing and marketing of cultivated meat products at a scale near conventional meat production in the United States is at least a decade or even two decades away, supporters of the livestock industry are taking steps to slow its development and create doubt about its safety. It isn’t a new strategy. A similar effort was made with some success to demonize the development of plants and ingredients using genetically modified organisms.

Such tactics may slow the industry’s development, but they will not halt its progress. Courts will eventually decide if states can outright ban cultivated meat, and the benefits — most notably around animal welfare, sustainability and even health and wellness — will be key to drawing consumer interest.

Rather than strengthening their position, those seeking to limit or ban cultivated meat reveal how concerned they are about the technology’s bright promise.