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Why companies are mass-producing edible insects

Feb 23, 2020
(soft clink) - These are whole grilled and Texas barbecue flavored cricket snacks. They started out like that and went on a wild journey: born on a robotic cricket farm in Texas, raised in a big vat, frozen in cricket bricks, then roasted and flavored. And for the record, they are fine. Eating

insects

is common in much of the world. It just never caught on in the United States, but some business owners think we're ready. In fact, the last five years have been a rollercoaster of booms and busts in insect farming. And at stake is a quirky snack or food revolution. - I can't look at this. (laughs) - It's a little crazy. (light guitar music) - Worldwide, 2 billion people eat

insects

as part of their regular diet.
why companies are mass producing edible insects
In Europe and the United States, not so much. - I can't do it, I won't do it. - People have tried. In 1885, entomologist Vincent Holt wrote a manifesto titled "Why not eat insects?" He wrote, "Philosophy does not ask us to neglect any healthy source of food," and then gave us some pretty sweet dinner menus. - Slug soup, moth sautéed in butter, stag beetle larvae on toast. - But in 2013, the United Nations published its own version of a manifesto. The report begins with the apocalypse: 9 billion people by 2050, land shortage, food crisis, overfishing, climate change. But then it makes a pretty strong argument for insects as food in the future.
why companies are mass producing edible insects

More Interesting Facts About,

why companies are mass producing edible insects...

Crickets, for starters, are packed with fat, protein, vitamins, and fiber. They emit fewer greenhouse gases than livestock and use much less land. And they are cold-blooded, so they spend their calories growing instead of warming up. Thus, to grow one kilogram of crickets you only need about 1.7 kilograms of food. One kilogram of cow, maybe 10 kilos of food. And that's just crickets, a species of insect from the 1900s that we know is

edible

. In other words, it's time to get much more serious about growing insects. - You know, every once in a while you'll hear a cricket hitting puberty. - Our cricket snacks come from Aspire, a futuristic insect farm in Austin, Texas.
why companies are mass producing edible insects
Mohammed Ashour is the co-founder and CEO. He officially started the company in 2013 after he and his team won the Hult Prize. It's a college business competition with an amazing emcee. - From McGill University, Aspire. - And that year, a goal that fit perfectly into the UN report. - The simple premise was: who can build a business that within ten years can address the food security of 20 million people around the world? -Mohammed and his team won by coming up with a plan to grow insects on a large scale. Up to a million crickets a day can be raised here, or 100,000 pounds a year.
why companies are mass producing edible insects
But apparently that's nothing. - From here, we will go to a commercial facility that will allow us to produce more than two orders of magnitude in terms of annual production each year. - Depending on where you look, Aspire is either a Wonka-style factory of the future or a muggy, infested storage unit. Maybe both. - We have a very low population of crickets that just wander around. - This is how the farm works. Crickets hatch from eggs and start out as small dots called pinheads. They grow in this room for about six weeks with the help of robots that deliver water and food.
Once they are nice and big, they go to the combine. - We load the containers into them, then they turn them over and everything is separated inside the machine. - Somehow, live crickets are separated from dead ones and cricket droppings or poop. That is sold as fertilizer. Mohammed calls this a herding process, but not everyone knows the details. - It sounds like one of the most patented things. - Yeah, that's pretty exclusive, we just... - Yeah. - It happens. (both laugh) - And then it happens. - According to Mohammed, the lubricant for all these wheels is automation, and they have an entire R&D laboratory to experiment with new agricultural technologies. - In our case, this cannot be underestimated.
We focus on which steps are isolable, repeatable, and fit perfectly with automated approaches. Automation will be crucial for us to truly do things at scale. - Finally, the collected crickets freeze to death. It is a common way to sacrifice insects. Then all those thousands of crickets come back as 4.5 pound blocks of protein. The culinary steps are done off-site, but the end result is sandwiches. Whole roasted crickets or protein powder for bars and granola. It's a small step towards a big movement. - I think the challenge that we understood from the beginning is that we are not just building a company, but we are trying to lay the foundation for an entire industry. - Which is exciting, but that foundation isn't exactly stable. - I'm not even going to get close, no, I'm already too close. (laughs) - So, that 2013 UN report?
It made waves. American insect startups became popular and the media fell in love. - Insects can be on our menu. - Bugs for dinner. - Eating insects. - In 2015, the insect business was booming and farmers were having a real moment. - Yes, I gave mistakes to the art director of Pulp Fiction, which is my personal highlight, you know. -Kevin Bachhuber was in that new cohort of farmers and that changed his life. But the tide of attention became a blessing and a curse. - We did this thing where we built up all this interest and all this demand and stuff, and the production of real live animals turns out to be much slower than the production and dissemination of ideas.
People say, "Okay, I'm ready to try bugs, where can I get them?" And everyone said, "Well, we're sold out again for four months." - It didn't help that the press... was the press. - It's an absolute exhaustion of local news puns. - In a couple of years, business could improve. - Meanwhile, Kevin was learning the hard way that raising livestock of any kind is not easy. - I used to joke that you weren't really a cricket farmer until you accidentally killed your first 100,000 crickets, and now I think you're not really a cricket farmer until, you know, you've mourned them and moved on. , don't feel anything when you accidentally take out 100,000 at a time. -So, too much hype, shaky production, and lots of bad puns meant the whole bug boom fizzled.
Public interest waned and some businesses failed. Others make insect-based products, but outsource the cultivation. Kevin became a consultant, although he still dreams of farming. - It's like... one of those "when I'm old and retired" fantasies. - But some new

companies

managed to get ahead. And overall, Kevin believes the chaos of the past five years was worth it. - We get carried away a little bit and you know what, sometimes you just get carried away a little bit and it's okay. - Aspire resisted and still thinks big: robots and huge warehouses. But for what it's worth, it's not the only way. - Monica! - Hello, it's a pleasure to meet you. - Thank you for having us. - This is the last stop on our cricket tour.
Don Bugito is a boutique company with a small greenhouse farm in Oakland, California. - I see a lot of different types of food, I see some Cheerios, I see lettuces, I see carrots. - Crickets are very sensitive, right? They can't just eat anything. They are natural Cheerios, by the way, they are not really Cheerios. - Oh, even they get the good organic products. - Yes, in fact they do (laughs), yes. -It is the work of Mónica Martínez who has been at this since 2011. In fact, she appears in that UN report as a case study.
She shares Mohammed's bug obsession and sells very similar cricket snacks. But she approaches it all very differently. Her farm is almost completely plastic-free, unheated and only lit by natural light. - So we are organic, non-GMO. There is no freedom of cultivation, right, because you don't want your insects to be free. - That would be difficult. - For Monica, none of this is revolutionary. She grew up in Mexico, where

edible

insects are plentiful and delicious. She remembers her uncle bringing fresh agave worms home and frying them in butter. - Once you eat it, it's like this... it's like this connection that you get with the plant.
It's also a really beautiful, umami-type flavor. - When Don Bugito launched, Mónica was not a farmer. She purchased all of her crickets from other

companies

, but could not guarantee the quality of hers. - That's when we sometimes get stressed by waking up in the middle of the night thinking, "What did this cricket eat?" You know, "How do I know it's safe to eat them?" There were some farms that fed the insects fishmeal and the insects tasted like fish. -The solution was her own farm. To be clear, these are not enough crickets to run a business.
In fact, Monica buys a lot from Aspire. But as much as she hopes to grow up, she never wants to be Aspire. - One of the opportunities is to make edible insects, because it is something so new that we can do it differently. I don't want to say it's right or wrong, but I would say it's fine, but there's no need to resort to industrial farming practices with edible insects. It seems like that's the easy way... we're doing the harder way. (laughs) - The hard way also means cooking, seasoning and canning yourself too. But one bonus: free snacks.
These two stories, Aspire's and Don Bugito's, start the same and end the same. What happens in between looks and feels quite different, but both companies are on the same quest. They are completely dedicated to their work. - It was a kind of group activity, we all went and got a cricket tattoo together. - They are making DIY equipment and killing thousands of crickets by mistake. - There have been like three times in which we thought: "My God,

mass

acre!" - They are weathering the economy and fickle consumers. - That's pretty gross. - They are advancing, waiting for the rise of the insects.
The big one. For real this time. - It's actually pretty good. - It's good, it has a good crunch, I like the crunch. - Oh, oh, oh, oh, okay, okay. They taste like little corn chips. Okay, it has a nice smoky flavor. - Mmmm, these are great. (laughs) They are so good. - You can see his eyes. They look like little crickets because they are.

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