How Good Is Cricket Protein, Really? What DIAAS Scores Actually Show

"High in protein" is easy to print on a packet. "Good protein" is a harder claim, because protein quality is something scientists actually measure — and the number depends on both what amino acids a food contains and how much of them your small intestine can absorb.

So how does cricket protein score when you put it through that test? The honest answer is: quite well, but with real caveats, and the processing matters more than most brands admit. Here's what the research shows.

First, what protein quality actually means

Your body needs nine indispensable (essential) amino acids it can't make itself. A protein source is judged on two things: whether it supplies all nine in useful proportions, and how much of each one survives digestion and gets absorbed.

For decades the standard measure was PDCAAS (Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score). In 2013, an FAO expert consultation recommended replacing it with DIAAS — the Digestible Indispensable Amino Acid Score — which measures each amino acid individually and uses digestibility at the end of the small intestine rather than a whole-protein average from faecal analysis. It's a stricter, more informative measure, and unlike PDCAAS it isn't capped at 100.

The FAO framework sorts foods into three bands: a DIAAS below 75 supports no protein quality claim, 75–99 is considered a good-quality protein source, and 100 or above is excellent.

What the cricket studies found

The most detailed work to date comes from a 2023 study in Frontiers in Nutrition by Hammer and colleagues at Agroscope and ETH Zurich. The team ran house crickets (Acheta domesticus), mealworm larvae and cooked chicken breast through a standardised laboratory digestion model and calculated in vitro DIAAS values for each.

Two findings stand out.

Digestibility is high. Total protein digestibility for house crickets ranged from 79% to 93%, depending on how they were processed. That undercuts the common assumption that the exoskeleton makes insect protein largely unavailable — most of it is digested.

The score lands close to chicken. Using the amino acid requirement pattern for young children (6 months to 3 years), blanched crickets scored an in vitro DIAAS of 92, blanched mealworms 89, and chicken 113. On the FAO bands, that puts blanched crickets firmly in the "good quality" range — not equal to chicken, but in the same conversation, and comfortably above what wheat protein typically achieves.

The part most brands leave out: processing

Here's the finding we think is most useful to anyone buying a protein snack. Across the different processing and preparation methods tested, cricket DIAAS values ranged from 40 to 92. That's the difference between "good quality protein" and "no quality claim at all" — from the same insect.

Oven-drying reduced digestibility. So, to a lesser extent, did chitin reduction — and the lowest scores in the study were found in chitin-reduced samples, which is a genuinely counter-intuitive result given that chitin is often blamed for poor digestibility in the first place.

The practical takeaway: cricket protein isn't one thing. How it's dried, heated and refined changes what you actually absorb. A number quoted from a study on blanched crickets doesn't automatically transfer to whatever is in the packet in front of you.

Three honest caveats

We'd rather flag these than pretend they don't exist.

These are in vitro results. They come from a laboratory model of digestion, not from feeding people. The authors say plainly that further studies are needed to establish in vivo DIAAS for insects in humans. Lab models are well validated, but they are still models.

The scores use a child reference pattern. The headline figures above are calculated against the amino acid requirements of children aged 6 months to 3 years. Scores against the pattern for older children and adults differ.

Insect protein content is probably being overstated. DIAAS calculations conventionally estimate protein as total nitrogen × 6.25. In insects some of that nitrogen sits in chitin rather than protein, so the study's authors note this inflates the apparent protein content — which in turn means protein quality may actually be underestimated by current methods.

Does any of this matter for a snack?

Realistically, a packet of crackers isn't where you meet your protein needs. The Health Promotion Board puts the requirement for Singaporean adults aged 18–49 at roughly 0.8g per kg of body weight — about 50g to 60g a day for an average adult — rising to about 1.2g/kg for those aged 50 and above. Most of that comes from meals: fish, eggs, taukwa, dhal, milk.

Where protein quality does matter in snacking is at the margin. If you snack most afternoons, the difference between a snack whose protein is well absorbed and one whose protein is mostly filler adds up over a year. It's a small lever, pulled often.

A note on HexaCrunch

Our baked brown-rice crackers use cricket protein, which is why this research matters to us — and why we don't claim it is equivalent to chicken or whey. The evidence says it's a good-quality protein with high digestibility, and that processing choices are the variable to watch. If you'd like to try the range, the Try-All 3-Pack is the easiest place to start.

Sources

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