Over eight weeks last summer we shipped 14 live batches of T. molitor larvae from our Nottinghamshire facility to a processing partner in Lisbon. We crossed two borders, navigated paperwork we did not fully expect, and lost partial stock during a heatwave that nobody forecast correctly. What follows are the notes we kept, condensed into something useful for anyone planning a similar route.
The paperwork layer nobody warned us about
Post-Brexit, live insect shipments from Great Britain into Portugal require both a UK export health certificate and an EU TRACES NT notification. The two systems do not talk to each other. You need both before the vehicle moves, not after. We learned this when our first consignment sat at Calais for six hours while we chased a signature.
Key documents required per consignment:
- UK Export Health Certificate (EHC OV65 at time of writing, verify before use)
- TRACES NT pre-notification filed by the EU importer, not the exporter
- Species-level identification on all accompanying paperwork, not just “mealworms”
- Temperature log from origin facility, covering the 48 hours before departure
If the paperwork is not complete before the truck starts, the truck will stop somewhere cold and expensive.
What the heatwave taught us
Batches 9 and 11 departed during a four-day heat event where road temperatures in southern France hit 38C. We were using passive cooling with phase-change inserts rated to 30C. That was not enough. Mortality in those two batches ran at roughly 22%, against a baseline of under 4% for the other 12.
The fix we implemented from batch 12 onward: active refrigeration units in the transport crates, pre-cooled to 16C before loading, with a temperature data logger that emails an alert if the interior exceeds 24C. Cost per consignment went up by around 80 GBP. Mortality cost on a failed batch is roughly 900 GBP. The math is not complicated.
What we would do differently
The learning that sits heaviest is timing. We shipped during a period of unstable weather because the processing partner’s production schedule required it. Next season we are negotiating a two-week flexibility window into the contract so we can hold stock if a forecast looks dangerous. Live logistics always has a biological clock ticking, but a few days’ margin is almost always cheaper than a bad transit.