Industrial insect farming is scaling rapidly — welfare frameworks must develop alongside the industry.
Industrial insect farming has grown from a niche practice to a significant food systems player in under a decade. The welfare questions it raises are genuinely novel — the scale (potentially trillions of animals), the uncertainty about sentience, and the lack of established welfare norms create an urgent need for research and precautionary policy. Developing welfare guidelines now — before the industry becomes too entrenched to change — is far easier than retrofitting welfare norms onto an established industrial practice. The trajectory of insect farming welfare policy will set precedents for how we treat all invertebrates in food systems.