The 2030 Agenda advances: Spain opened its first cricket flour factory

The production of food based on crickets and other insects is already an expanding practice, and recently the first cricket flour factory arrived in Spain to distribute products in supermarkets across the country.

After the European Commission recently approved the consumption of species like the mealworm, the migratory locust, and the house cricket, various "factories of the future" installed in Spain, representing the 2030 Agenda, are beginning to offer these products on supermarket shelves.

Among them stands out Grillco, a Catalan company that has decided to bet on this new and delirious food paradigm, promoted by Brussels, and already produces cricket flour on an industrial scale.

Based in Barcelona, Grillco not only processes crickets to turn them into flour but also takes care of their breeding, with the aim of "ensuring product quality from its origin." Francesc Picornell, one of the founders, describes the process as intensive and comparable to traditional livestock farming: "We breed the crickets from their initial phase, feed them, let them grow, and then process them to turn them into flour usable in all kinds of recipes."

Production is organized in different stages. When the crickets reach the ideal size, they are dehydrated and moved to the workshop where grinding is done until obtaining "a fine flour with high nutritional content." Juliana Villasante, co-founder of the firm, points out that after completing the processing, the product is packaged and ready for distribution in the market.

Within the framework of the "sustainable goals" and the "Green Agenda" promoted by Brussels, Spain under the socialist and progressive Pedro Sánchez is beginning to position itself as a key player in this transformation. Unlike countries like Italy, where the government of Giorgia Meloni banned the use of worm flour in traditional products like bread or pizza in defense of Mediterranean cuisine, these 2030 Agenda initiatives are being developed in Spanish territory.

A notable example is Salamanca, which is preparing to host the largest insect farm on the planet, with a projected production capacity of 100,000 tons annually of derivatives from these bugs.

The protagonist will be the tenebrio molitor, better known as the mealworm, which will be used in a wide range of industries: from livestock feed and crop fertilizers to cosmetics, pharmaceutical products, and textiles. Additionally, it will also be incorporated into the production of bread and pastry products.