Flexibility in social foraging behavior allows animals to maximize foraging success in nutritionally unpredictable environments. The desert locust Schistocerca gregaria exhibits one of the most extreme examples of this flexibility. Usually, solitarious locusts populate sparse landscapes at low densities and forage alone. However, under suitable conditions, mediated by an increase in density of surrounding conspecifics, locusts gradually convert into a gregarious phase. The transition to group foraging entails considerable changes in the type, quality, and quantity of sensory information available to individual animals. In addition to personally acquired evidence, gregarious locusts have access to a plethora of social information, allowing them to integrate socially derived cues on the location and quality of a food source. How is this transition mediated in terms of sensory processing? What role do social cues, such as the smell of conspecifics, play in foraging decisions? How is that modulated with change in conspecifics density? To this end, we addressed these questions by investigating the early olfactory processing of food odor cues in the presence and absence of the colony smell. We do so by widefield and confocal calcium imaging of antennal lobe projection neurons in both gregarious and solitarious locusts. We demonstrate that a simulated olfactory group context increases the overall magnitude of projection neuron activity to food odorants in gregarious animals. Yet, this social modulation is phase-dependent and does not occur in solitarious animals, suggesting it to be a potential adaptation of the olfactory system to facilitate or promote foraging in a group.