Good news! The Uganda National Bureau of Standards (UNBS) adopted a draft standard on edible insects. This Draft Uganda Standard specifies the requirements, sampling and test methods for edible insects’ products intended for human consumption or for further processing Uganda Standard

This Draft Standard DUS DARS 1261: 2024, Edible insects — Edible crickets — Specification, is identical with and has been reproduced from a Draft African Standard, and adopted as a Uganda Standard. The committee responsible for this document is Technical Committee UNBS/TC 221, Agriculture, forestry and biotechnology.

This document is based on the work of The African Organization for Standardization (ARS) who develop and harmonize African Standards for the purpose of enhancing Africa’s internal trading capacity, increase Africa’s product and service competitiveness globally and uplift the welfare of African communities. ARS developed a draft standard for edible insects; see 24_06065_00_e.pdf.

Because recent scientific evidences are pointing at the great unexploited potential that edible insects possess in contributing to the overall food security and nutrition. There is a lot of innovation currently going on to introduce edible insects as alternative nutrient enhancing ingredients to existing food products. It is against this emerging trend that this standard was developed to particularly provide a basis of assuring the general safety and quality of dried insect products. The standards address itself to parameters that are directly related to safety and quality of the products such as moisture contents which has an effect on keeping quality of the products, heavy metal and microbiological contaminations owing to susceptibility of the insects to contaminations as well as offering guidance to packaging and labelling.

This novel food legislation will support the scaling of the cricket business supported by Flying Food.