Flour power Insects on the nation's menu at last

Italy's first facility breeding crickets for human food hopes to challenge the country's deep-rooted preconceptions

- Angela Giuffrida MONTECASSIANO

'Goon, try it, it is good," said José Francesco Cianni as he handed over a packet containing a light brown powder with a crispy texture.

Sitting in his office in a pristine warehouse-like building, down the corridor from five rooms where millions of crickets are being bred, Cianni is in jubilant spirits.

In January, Nutrinsect, the startup founded by Cianni and his brother in Italy's central Marche region, was the country's first company to be given a licence to produce and sell insect-based food for human consumption.

The licence was a just reward for the years the siblings had spent pursuing their conviction that protein- and vitamin-packed crickets were not only good for human health, but could contribute towards saving the planet.

"The whole aim is to produce alternative proteins in a sustainable way," said Cianni, who grew up on a traditional farm in Calabria.

Nutrinsect's licence was all the more noteworthy given the backdrop of proclamations by Giorgia Meloni's rightwing government that Italy's treasured cuisine must be sheltered from the menace of insects. But after the EU approved the sale of crickets, locusts and darkling beetle larvae for human consumption in early 2023, there was a flurry of permit requests from Italian companies keen to take a slice of the edible insects market, which in Europe is forecast to reach €2.7bn ($2.9bn) by 2030.