Eating insects - many people still shudder when when hearing these words, or they're thinking of Thailand or Indonesia, where fried crickets and mealworms are sold on the streets. But since the "Novel Food Regulation" was implemented at the beginning of 2018, a growing number of food items containing insects has made it into several supermarkets across the EU. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) is responsible for the approval and health assessment of these new foods.

Insect protein is healthy and easy on the environment

The advantages of insects as food items are obvious: they are rich in protein and low in fat at the same time. Moreover, breeding and farming them is much more resource-efficient than farming cattle, pigs or chickens. In fact, insects only need a fraction of food, water, land and time to provide the same amount of protein as conventional animal sources. But how can citizens across the EU, where insects are not traditionally a part of the meal plan, be convinced of these qualities? Is it enough to appeal to environmental concerns or do we need more sophisticated marketing strategies to persuade Westerners to eat insects?

Eco-friendly or a luxury

This question was investigated by Fabian Christandl from Fresenius University, Sebastian Berger and Annika Wyss from the University of Bern, Christian Bärtsch from ESSENTO Food AG and Christina Schmidt from the University of Cologne. The study was carried out at the Cologne campus of the Fresenius University of Applied Sciences and included 180 subjects that were divided into two groups. All test persons first received a flyer advertising insect-based food. On the flyers of half of the participants, the health-promoting and eco-friendly aspects of the insects were emphasized: The flyers were labelled with slogans such as "meat has never been so healthy" or "meat has never been so environmentally friendly". The other half of the participants received flyers advertising insects as luxury products and associating them with a trendy lifestyle. Afterwards, the participants were offered mealworm chocolate pralines and the scientitst analysed how many of the test persons actually tasted the pralines.

Targeted marketing strategy for insect products

As the researchers report in the journal "Frontiers in Nutrition", the results were quite clear. According to them, 76.2% of those presented with insects as a luxury product tried the chocolate pralines with mealworms. Of the participants who received advertising slogans highlighting the environmental benefits, only 61.3% tried the insect chocolate. For Christandl and colleagues this is an unequivocal sign: "From our results it can be deduced that the advertising should emphasise insects as luxury food. Thereby more consumers can be enticed to include insects in their diets," recommends Christandl.

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