Chemical Food Safety of Edible Insects in the European Union: Current Evidence and Regulatory Blind Spots

Edible insects are increasingly promoted as alternative foods, but their chemical safety is difficult to assess because hazards may arise throughout the production chain and the regulatory framework remains incomplete. This structured narrative review synthesises current evidence on chemical hazards in edible insects and examines their interpretation within the European Union regulatory framework. The available literature indicates that rearing substrates and production environments are major sources of contamination, particularly for heavy metals, mycotoxins, pesticide residues, veterinary medicinal product residues, and persistent or emerging contaminants. However, transfer into insect biomass is highly species-, life-stage-, and compound-dependent, and metabolism, excretion, or transformation may reduce parent-compound concentrations without eliminating uncertainty regarding metabolites and other transformation products. Processing and storage may further modify the chemical profile through the formation of acrylamide, furan derivatives, lipid-oxidation products, and biogenic amines. Although the EU novel food framework provides product-specific premarket assessment, representative market-occurrence and consumption data remain limited, and generally applicable insect-specific maximum levels for contaminants have not been established, whereas pesticide residues are governed by the horizontal EU MRL framework. Chemical safety assessment should therefore adopt a full-chain, species- and product-specific approach integrating substrate control, contaminant fate, processing, storage, and consumer exposure.