Future proofing the protein nation of the world
Raewyn Bleakley, Chief Executive, New Zealand Food & Grocery Council
New Zealand is a pretty unique country, perched near the bottom of the world where sheep still outnumber humans by a ratio of roughly 4.5 to 1. If you include the national dairy and beef herd of 9.84 million, there are 6.2 hoofed producers of agricultural exports to every human.
According to the Ministry for Primary Industries for the financial year ending 30 June 2026 our annual export earnings from both dairy and meat have risen significantly compared with past years. These record earnings amounted to $28.6 billion for dairy and $14.1 billion for meat and wool combined. If there’s one thing we are world class at, it is producing extremely high-quality protein.
But despite this massive, highly efficient pasture-based livestock network, New Zealand is proactively developing cellular agriculture (creating real meat and dairy proteins directly from cell cultures). This is primarily as a defensive strategy to future-proof our export economy. Because of our economic dependence on dairy and meat, any shifts in how the rest of the world produce and consume milk and meat proteins makes us extremely vulnerable.
Global food companies are investing heavily in technology to enable the successful scaling of cell-cultured protein ingredients, which could ultimately replace traditional dairy and meat ingredients for a lower cost. Becoming proficient at cellular agriculture domestically will help to ensure New Zealand does not get left behind when the international market heads in this direction.
Unlike many readers of FoodNZ, I am no expert in the intricacies o[f] precision fermentation, cellular agriculture or what goes on inside bioreactors – I will leave that important work to you. I am fascinated by how this technological capability and development is strategically being linked into national policy though.
The work of the MBIE-funded “Catalysing Future Foods” programme, ably led by Professor Renwick Dobson, Dr Laura Domigan and Professor Dame Juliet Gerrard, and a team of prominent scientific experts is aiming to shape New Zealand’s policy response to cellular agriculture via three pillars:
Setting the policy and regulatory framework – advocating for agile, transparent regulatory pathways under Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) to ensure local biotech companies can scale safely without being bottlenecked by the lack of a regulatory pathway.
Establishing significant scientific collaborations between New Zealand universities and other global academic research leaders in cellular agriculture. These are being established between the University of Canterbury, the University of Auckland, Massey University, and top global hubs like the National University of Singapore and the University of Wageningen. This is matching New Zealand experts in the field of cell culture and food matrices with the creation of open-access platforms to crowdsource feedback from stakeholders across both the agricultural and tech sectors.
Ensuring cellular agriculture co-exists with traditional agriculture as a companion rather than a threat. The team’s strategic vision outlines a hybrid future: traditional pasture-raised meats will be positioned at the hyper-premium, luxury end of global markets, while cellular agriculture and precision fermentation absorb the volume demand for functional food ingredients and bulk commodity supply chains.
But is the global consumer ready and willing to purchase and eat foods produced by this technology on a daily basis yet? In my discussions with the Catalysing Future Foods team and our members, the issue of consumer acceptance is always raised. In a recent policy paper, Treacher, Gerrard and Brown skilfully describe that the public perception and sociopolitical acceptance constitute the primary non-technical challenges for cellular agriculture in New Zealand. The research highlights four key findings: consumer psychological barriers (“yuck factor”) tied to naturalness, the necessity of transparent labelling to prevent backlash, the protection of cultural identity associated with pastoral farming, and the need for rigorous regulatory frameworks to overcome historical genetic modification stigmas.
I welcome the government’s investment in this vital strategic work: it is the kind of forward-looking commitment that can help safeguard New Zealand’s economy well into the next century while keeping us at the forefront of supplying high-quality proteins to the world.
