A postwar restaurant in Pampanga known for serving crickets has become the starting point for a broader argument: that the Philippines could transform its long-standing tradition of eating insects into a commercial insect-protein industry, beginning with animal feed.

Writing in a BusinessWorld commentary, Marvin Tort, a former managing editor of the publication and former chairman of the Philippine Press Council, recalls visiting Everybody's Café along MacArthur Highway in San Fernando, Pampanga. Older friends described the restaurant — founded in 1946 and relocated to its present MacArthur Highway site in 1967 — as an icon of Kapampangan cuisine, the culinary tradition of Pampanga, and a postwar institution that helped preserve and popularize local food traditions. Among the menu items unfamiliar to him as a "city boy" were frog legs, camaru (crickets), and grasshoppers. He settled instead for pindang damulag, sliced carabao meat cured into jerky.

Tort writes that reading recently about Thailand's expanding edible-insect industry immediately brought the restaurant to mind. The Philippines, argues, is "not starting from zero": Kapampangans and other local communities have long incorporated insects into their cuisine, and that tradition could carry larger economic benefits than commonly appreciated.

Not a solution to hunger, but a protein option

Insects will not solve the country's hunger and poverty problems, Tort cautions. But as the Philippines seeks to produce more protein for a growing population while limiting pressure on land, water, and the environment, edible insects "need serious consideration." While they can be eaten directly, he identifies a more immediate opportunity: their use as ingredients in livestock, poultry, and aquaculture feed.

Tort acknowledges that many urban consumers associate edible insects with indigenous communities, rural traditions, or roadside delicacies, and that the idea of eating insects evokes discomfort. But as concerns over climate change, food security, resource use, and the environmental costs of conventional livestock production grow, attitudes may shift. "We would not suddenly replace chicken with crickets," he writes, yet insect farming could still become a new agricultural industry.

Thailand's commercial model

Thailand offers one of the clearest examples of how a traditional food practice can develop into a commercial value chain. As in the Philippines, insects have long been part of rural Thai diets. Beginning in the 1990s, researchers, extension agencies, and farmers developed methods for raising insects commercially rather than relying mainly on wild collection. Farmers produced insects at household and small-enterprise scale, researchers improved breeding and production systems, and processors and retailers developed channels for selling insects through markets, restaurants, and packaged-food products.

Citing a case study by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the United Nations agency for food and agriculture, Tort notes that Thailand counts roughly 20,000 registered insect-farming enterprises, most of them small-scale household operations, with more than 200,000 rearing pens. In his view, Thailand did not merely persuade people to eat insects; it built an ecosystem that turned a traditional food into a commercial agricultural activity.

Cultural foundation, with nutritional caveats

The Philippines already has a cultural foundation. Local communities consume camaru, grasshoppers, termites, ant eggs, and beetle larvae — foods that, Tort argues, should not be dismissed as curiosities or survival foods simply because many urban Filipinos do not eat them regularly. Local studies indicate that Philippine edible insects can be nutritionally significant, although results depend on species, preparation, moisture content, edible portion, and the reference values used.

The main challenge, he writes, is not a lack of biological or cultural precedent but the absence of a large, integrated commercial sector comparable to Thailand's. Building one would require farming systems, processing facilities, research programs, product-development pipelines, quality standards, investment, and reliable markets.

Feed before food

A major commercial opportunity may lie beyond whole insects, in processed ingredients such as insect meal, defatted insect flour, protein concentrates, and oils. These could be used in selected food products, pet food, aquaculture feed, and livestock rations, subject to safety standards and regulatory approval.

Animal feed is the more realistic starting point, Tort argues. Consumers may be reluctant to eat whole insects or insect-based foods, whereas feed manufacturers can evaluate insect meal on objective measures: protein quality, digestibility, price, consistency, safety, and performance in animal diets.

He stresses that no agricultural industry succeeds through farming alone, pointing to the value-chain pathways followed in rice, poultry, aquaculture, coffee, and coconut. Insect protein would similarly require farmers, infrastructure, standards, financing, research, and dependable buyers, with government playing a role in developing the new industry.

Regulation is the largest immediate obstacle

Regulatory certainty, according to Tort, is the biggest near-term hurdle. He says he has not identified a single comprehensive Philippine framework governing insect farming for both human food and animal feed; relevant requirements instead appear to fall across existing food-safety, feed, agricultural, environmental, and business regulations.

That does not mean the country lacks relevant rules. The Bureau of Agriculture and Fisheries Standards (BAFS) develops standards covering agricultural products, food safety, and related areas; feed establishments are subject to registration and licensing requirements; and BAFS has issued technical material on safety considerations.

Future regulation should clearly distinguish two sectors — insects produced for animal feed and insects produced for direct human consumption — Tort writes. The two require different rules on permitted feedstocks, microbial and chemical contamination, processing, traceability, labeling, worker safety, and product registration, among other areas. Coordination would fall to the Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration, environmental agencies, and science institutions. He argues the country should establish clear safety requirements before encouraging large-scale production or pursuing export markets. The near-term signal to watch is regulatory rather than agricultural: whether those agencies begin moving toward the kind of coordinated framework Tort describes.

A more diverse food future

Discussions of food security often assume more rice production or more meat imports, but Tort expects the future to be more diverse: plant proteins, microbial fermentation, algae, cultivated meat, and insects may all become part of Philippine food systems over the next two decades. Insect protein, he argues, should be viewed as a component of the broader food and agricultural strategy, one that can address unequal access to nutritious food.

Rather than repeating Thailand's journey from street food to processed ingredient, he suggests the Philippines could move early toward higher-value, more technically demanding applications — developing safe feed ingredients, standardized processing, reliable testing, and clear regulations before concentrating on gourmet menus or export branding.

For Tort, the question is not whether insects belong on the Filipino table — in places such as Everybody's Café, they already do — but whether the country can move from culinary tradition to a safe, regulated, and commercially viable insect-protein industry capable of creating rural livelihoods, converting suitable by-products into useful inputs, supporting food and feed security, and participating in an emerging global industry.

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Marvin Tort is a former managing editor of BusinessWorld and a former chairman of the Philippine Press Council. This article is based on his commentary, Insect protein, originally published by BusinessWorld.