Insect ingredient scanner: check any food in seconds

Why insect ingredients are so hard to spot

Insects have been in the food supply for decades, but almost never under a name you would recognise. There are two separate problems here, and most people only know about one of them.

The old problem: insect-derived additives. These have been in confectionery, drinks and glazed sweets for a very long time. They hide behind E-numbers and behind pleasant-sounding trade names.

The new problem: whole insects as an ingredient. Since 2021 the European Commission has authorised several insect species as novel foods, and they can legally appear in ordinary supermarket products. The label often carries the Latin binomial rather than a plain-English name:

• Acheta domesticus, the house cricket
• Tenebrio molitor, the yellow mealworm
• Alphitobius diaperinus, the lesser mealworm, sometimes sold as buffalo worm
• Locusta migratoria, the migratory locust

If you are scanning a label for the word "cricket", you will walk straight past Acheta domesticus powder. A scanner closes that gap.

What a scanner does that reading the label does not

Reading an ingredient list yourself fails in three predictable ways.

1. You do not know every alias. Very few people have memorised that "confectioner's glaze" means lac-bug resin. A scanner matches against the full alias list every time.
2. The print is unreadable. Ingredient text on a curved bottle or a foil wrapper is often 5pt, low contrast, and partly in another language.
3. You get tired. Checking one packet carefully is easy. Checking a full trolley is not, and that is where mistakes happen.

Barcode scan and ingredient scan: use both

Most insect-scanner apps do only one of these. FoodCheckr does both, and they cover each other's blind spots.

Barcode scan looks the product up and returns everything at once: ingredients, nutrition, country of origin, categories and a verdict. It is faster, but it depends on the product existing in the database. Regional and own-brand products are the usual gaps.

Ingredient scan points the camera at the printed ingredient list and reads the text off the pack. It does not care whether the product has ever been catalogued. This is the one that works on the supermarket own-brand jar no database has heard of.

Reading the result

After a scan you get a verdict band at the top of the product page. Green means nothing insect-derived or flagged as harmful was matched. Anything flagged appears as a coloured pill carrying the additive name and E-number, so you can see what was found rather than just a score.

The app words its green verdict as "Product does not contain harmful or insect ingredients, check it just to be sure". That hedge is there for good reason. Ingredient databases are updated by people, recipes change without warning, and "may contain" statements are not always machine-readable. A scanner should shorten your check rather than replace your judgement.

Who this matters to

• Halal and kosher observers. Carmine is treated as haram by IFANCA, JAKIM, MUI and ESMA, and most kosher authorities do not certify it either.
• Vegans and vegetarians. All four ingredients above are animal-derived, and three of them turn up in products marketed as plant-based.
• People with shellfish or dust-mite allergies. See the warning above.
• Anyone who simply wants to know. That is reason enough on its own.