Mealworm (Tenebrio molitor) farming is expanding rapidly for food and feed, making welfare standards for this commonly farmed insect increasingly important.
Mealworm welfare sits at the edge of current scientific knowledge. Evidence for conscious experience in beetle larvae is limited, though their nervous systems are more complex than often assumed. As a precautionary welfare measure, mealworm farming should maintain appropriate temperature, humidity, and density conditions - which also optimise production yields. Slaughter methods including freezing before processing are preferable to alternatives that may cause prolonged stress responses. The Insect Welfare Research Society advocates for proportionate precautionary welfare standards in insect farming that scale with the evidence for sentience. As the mealworm industry scales to billions of individuals, even modest welfare improvements per animal would aggregate to enormous overall welfare gains.