This policy statement signals high level policy expectations for the production, manufacture and sale of novel foods cultured from animal cells. It sits alongside the New Zealand Food Safety (NZFS) regulatory statement for any business proposing to import, manufacture or sell an animal cell-cultured food product for human consumption in the New Zealand market under New Zealand food legislation.

The Spatially Explicit Fisheries Risk Assessment framework has recently been updated and applied to assess the fisheries risk to seabird populations within the New Zealand EEZ. In the current report, the approach is applied to seabirds globally in the southern hemisphere. Catchabilities were estimated from New Zealand captures. Then global fishing effort and species distributions were collated and used to assess the risk to seabirds from predicted fisheries captures throughout their range.

The total species population size estimate of New Zealand sea lion/pakake/whakahao was updated using the available demographic and population size information up to 2022 (the 2021–22 breeding season). All analyses were conducted within a Bayesian estimation framework, and the posterior total population size estimate was approximately 10 000 individuals in 2022 (median: 10 151; 95% credible interval: 8702–12 082 individuals), slightly below the estimate for 2015 using the same method.

A novel spatial risk assessment framework is proposed, based on the Spatially Explicit Fisheries Risk Assessment (SEFRA) and the Sustainability Assessment for Fishing Effects (SAFE). Risk is the probability that exploitation exceeds the Impact Sustainability Threshold (IST). Exploitation is estimated from the catchability and effort, using prior information on either the catchability or the population size. It is applied to shark and turtle species with different data characteristics.

This report provides a comprehensive overview of fishery data inputs for assessment of the risk of New Zealand commercial fisheries to New Zealand seabird populations. The risk assessment uses the Spatially Explicit Fisheries Risk Assessment (SEFRA) framework, which requires spatially resolved fishing effort and capture data. These data inputs were extracted from the Protected Species Capture database (version 6; up to and including the 2019/20 fishing year) and prepared for analysis.

This report details an implementation of the Spatially Explicit Fisheries Risk Assessment (SEFRA) framework to seabirds in the New Zealand Exclusive Economic Zone, attempting to quantify the impact of New Zealand commercial fisheries on New Zealand populations of seventy-one seabird species. As part of the project both the biological and fishery input data have been updated, as well as the structure of the model itself.

This survey assessed nutrition content and health claims made on 700 food labels across 16 food categories available for retail sale in 2022 in NZ. Claims were identified then assessed to show: the most commonly used claims, whether they met regulatory requirements in Standard 1.2.7 of the Food Standards Code, and any trends since the last survey in 2016/17. Nutrition Content claims were most commonly made on foods. Health claims were less common but had doubled in popularity compared with the previous survey.

Top 6 STEC (O26, O45, O103, O111, O121, and O145) plus O157 serotypes have been recognised in the US as adulterants in raw bulk manufacturing beef meat. This annual report summarises the confirmation testing outcomes of the N60 STEC Regulatory Programme for 2018, including WGS analysis of E. coli O157:H7 isolates from beef and clinical cases. All STEC O157:H7 bovine isolates were ST11.