Insect-based cat food: The pros and cons

You’ve probably seen your cat eat insects — we’re talking the occasional fly or spider, if they manage to catch them. They chew unappetizingly on the morsel of food and are pleased with themselves for another successful hunt.

You may be surprised to hear, then, that there’s an emerging market for cat food made primarily from insects. Rather than the type your cat might catch, the recipes are made using insects such as crickets, mealworms, or — predominantly — black soldier fly larvae. 

Often ground into a fine powder and added to dry cat food along with fruits, vegetables, and other protein, it appears no different to their usual dinner (so it’s not like you are feeding your cat a bowl full of dried insects if you’re concerned about how insect-based cat food appears). 

As with insects as human food, there are pros and cons to this type of diet. To help guide you through the newly emerging trend, we look at the benefits and downsides to feeding your cat insect-based cat food.

The Pros of Insect-Based Cat Food

Good source of protein

Meat and dairy aren’t the only sources of protein — insects are packed with it. Black soldier fly larvae, for instance, contain between 35% and 50% protein, plus plenty of amino acids and minerals including magnesium, calcium, zinc, and iron. 

Mealworms, when processed into defatted mealworm powder, contain similar levels of protein to beef, pork and salmon. Crickets, meanwhile, have comparable protein levels to soybean and fishmeal. 

Insects also provide a novel source of protein, which can result in another protein option if your cat suffers from allergies to meat or fish.

Sustainable source of food

If you’re a cat parent wanting to have a more positive environmental impact on the environment via your food purchases, insect-based pet food has been found to have a lower impact on the environment when compared to meals using livestock reared for animal consumption. 

Currently, the pet food industry produces approximately 100m tonnes of CO2 annually in the production of meat and fish products for pets ¹, while pet food accounts for 20% of the total global meat and fish consumption.

Research has also found that as well as requiring less water and agricultural land, insect farming for pet food reduces greenhouse gas emissions — estimates put it at producing 75-95% less CO2 than livestock farming².

One company manufacturing insect-based cat food and dog food is Yora. It farms black soldier fly larvae in Maryland, Kentucky, and uses them to make a range of cat food and cat treats available in the UK and Europe. Currently, the AAFCO is yet to approve insects for use in cat food (see below) in the U.S, but if it does, Yora’s food will be available in the U.S. alongside its insect-based dog food.

Good for vegetarian cat parents

We know that cats are obligate carnivores and shouldn’t be fed a meat-free diet, which some vegetarian cat parents can struggle with in terms of dealing with their own considerations regarding animals being killed to provide food for their pet. 

Insect-based pet food means that cat parents who struggle with feeding their cat meat or fish diets could possibly have an alternative choice, although of course living insects are killed as part of the process of making insect-based cat food.

The Cons of Insect-Based Cat Foods

Long-term effects as yet unstudied

As with any new food, feeding something new to your cat over a long period of time might have effects that are as-yet unknown, such as contributing toward negative health issues. Although insect-based pet food is packed with nutrients and protein, many pet parents look into long-term studies on the effects of a new diet before moving their cat on to it.

A 2019 study examining the use of insects as food for animals noted that the “health-promoting effects of insect products need to be studied more as well as the long-term impact of insects as food on the nutritional status of dogs and cats. Concerning indispensable amino acids, the limiting ones with BSF methionine and threonine for dogs and the first methionine for cats (Bosch etal., 2019)”³.

As interest in, and demand for, insect-based pet food for cats grows, more studies will take place into the effects over time on cats.

Approval in the U.S.

Unlike insect-based dog food, which was approved by the AAFCO for use in adult dog food in 2021, cat food has yet to be approved in the same way. 

However, the global insect-based pet food market is estimated to be worth $31bn by 2031, according to Future Market Insights, so it might not be long before approval is granted for insects to be used in cat food in the U.S, as the market is there. And in terms of benefiting the environment, as mentioned, it’s significantly better than farming meat for pet food.

The International Platform of Insects for Food and Feed (IPIFF) predicts that by 2025, the pet food sector will account for at least 40% of the global demand for insect meal. So whichever way you look at it, demand for insect-based pet food is only going to expand over the forthcoming years and it might not be long before you’re exchanging your cat’s chicken for crickets…

1. https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/comment-and-opinion/the-true-environmental-cost-of-petfood/684049.article ↩︎
2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10425145/ ↩︎
3. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379109616_Future_opportunities_for_products_derived_from_black_soldier_fly_BSF_treatment_as_animal_feed_and_fertilizer_-_A_systematic_review ↩︎