Hey, Cricket, How About We Turn You Into an Energy Bar?

Americans' appetite for protein supplements is hard to fathom. Now they think insect protein is a good business.

In 2013 the United Nations published a report that was downloaded more than two million times in its first 24 hours online. The 201 pages made essentially one point: at least 2 billion people eat insects, not because of famine but because insects taste good and are an excellent source of protein.

The report closed with a suggestion: "You should try it too."

It went on to become the strongest endorsement a batch of startups could cite when telling the story of insect protein. Some Chinese readers may find nothing strange in the idea — silkworm pupae are a home-cooked dish in plenty of places. The United States is another matter, and perhaps because the "national conditions" differ, so does the American insect business.

Kevin Bachhuber first tasted roasted crickets in Thailand in 2006, and the idea took root then. "But hardly anyone in the US was doing this back then — until I saw that UN report, and I felt the time had come." In 2014 the cricket farm he founded, Big Cricket Farms, was born in Ohio.

Exo, which sells energy bars made from crickets, was founded in New York almost as soon as the report came out. Founder Greg Sewitz told QDaily: "We were inspired by that report, and we wanted more people to understand the culture of eating insects." He first ran a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, hitting his $20,000 goal within 72 hours. The final tally beat his expectations: $54,911 from 1,241 backers.

Plenty of public numbers claim the edible insect market is growing fast. Besides the UN report, data from the market research firm Global Market Insights projects the global edible insect market will grow from $33 million today to $522 million by 2033.

Insects are considered an ideal source of dietary protein, and a good deal of research on insect protein supports that. A recent report from Vice said scientists from the US, Japan, France and India have declared that "cockroach milk" will become an ideal protein supplement for humans. Ten years ago Nathan Coussens, a researcher at the University of Iowa, spotted shiny crystals in the gut secretions of a cockroach and found they were a compound nutrient containing milk protein, fat and sugars.

"By weight, 65% of a cricket is protein, and it contains every amino acid the human body needs," Greg Sewitz said. The founders of all three US companies we interviewed rattled these numbers off by heart. Every 100 grams of crickets contains 20.5 grams of protein, against 25 grams for the same weight of chicken or beef — but compare dried crickets with beef jerky and the crickets have 22% more protein.

Add in Americans' rising enthusiasm for protein supplements and the boom in edible insects gets easier to understand.

Over the past five years, US protein bar sales rose from $372 million in 2010 to $489 million, while sales of protein-rich nuts climbed 32% to $3.4 billion in 2015. The food giants have noticed. This January General Mills bought the meat-snack maker EPIC Provisions, and last year Hershey bought the beef-jerky maker Krave Pure Food — both to feed consumer demand for protein.

"Of course, there's no sign right now that the US is headed for a protein crisis," Charles Wilson told QDaily. He founded the cricket flour company Cricket Flours in 2014. "There are plenty of sources of protein, but insects like crickets use very little water, land or other natural resources."

Kevin Bachhuber made the same point. Before he raised crickets, he grew tomatoes. "But you know what, crickets need only 1/30th the water and 1/25th the feed, which could mean I'd only have to spend half as much to start my business. That kind of cost-efficiency was too appealing to pass up."

Charles Wilson had a second reason to start a cricket flour company: his mother has a gluten allergy, which means she cannot eat wheat, barley or the other common grains that contain gluten. He found crickets made a good substitute in flour. "Crickets turned out to be a great option for our family, and once we'd made a new ingredient out of them, they became an option for our customers too."

"One thing I especially enjoy since starting the company is watching people try it for the first time. A lot of them are a little scared and a little eager at once, and then, when they find the taste isn't as strange as they imagined, they're relieved and pleasantly surprised." Bachhuber describes the taste of his company's crickets as "a bit like sweet corn, with a little nuttiness and a little sunflower seed."

His farm raises banded crickets (Gryllodes sigillatus). The work is to put them in clean, warm boxes with a stable environment, supply water and feed — a mix of grains, corn and vegetables — let them run through their eight-week life cycle on their own, and collect the eggs. In the cold, crickets go dormant in a state called diapause; staff then chill them further so they die without pain, and gather them up. Then it starts again. The crickets are frozen, packed and shipped to restaurants, distributors and other companies.

Some of them probably end up at Cricket Flours, whose job is to grind crickets into powder, sterilize and dry it, and blend it with other ingredients to become part of a flour.

Flour is easier to accept than a whole cricket. It looks no different from ordinary flour, and if the recipe is tuned well, consumers can barely taste the difference.

Under Cricket Flours' Amazon listing you can find several reviews along the same lines: "Now I like adding Cricket Flour to meals, peanut butter, muffins and chocolate chip cookies. My family hasn't noticed at all."

Cricket Flours also urges customers to bake with its flour, and has written a cookbook to teach those who don't know what to do with the stuff.

Wilson says his customers fall into three groups: people who need large amounts of protein for fitness or sport, people who avoid certain foods because of gluten allergies and other allergies, and people who agree that crickets as a protein source save resources and protect the environment. The products sell on e-commerce platforms like Amazon and in small health food shops, clinics and gyms.

At the start, though, they worried no one would be willing to try. What excited him most was the day he got a one-line email asking whether they sold flour, with a phone number at the bottom. They ended up supplying that restaurant chain, developing a recipe with it and launching the Oreo Mudpie Cricket Milkshake at 95 restaurants across the US.

Similar stories happened at the other startups. Greg Sewitz made his first cricket protein bar in 2013, while he was studying at Brown University. He and his co-founder Gabi Lewis bought two boxes of live crickets online and, with the help of Google, an oven and a blender, mixed crickets, dried fruit and cocoa into their first bar. "It tasted great. The recipe for what we sell now is pretty close to what it was then."

Sewitz and Lewis handed out and sold their bars at school parties and farmers markets, and when the response was good they decided to start a company in New York: Exo. They now work with various suppliers to buy crickets or cricket flour — a pound of crickets costs $25 to $30 — and add other ingredients to make bars in flavors like coconut-nut and apple-cinnamon. Each bar uses about 14 crickets. Yep.

The bars sell online and in local shops, gyms and retailers such as Whole Foods. Online accounts for 90% of sales so far.

From cricket farms to cricket flour to cricket protein bars, you can see that the US already has a complete supply chain. But wherever they sit on it, everyone faces the same two problems: how to get people past the mental block about eating bugs, and how to convince them it is safe.

There are many edible insects, but a lot of people — including the founders we interviewed — pick crickets, because crickets are more familiar in the US and easier to accept. "Generally speaking, when people think of crickets they have fairly warm memories. It reminds you of a hot summer night with your friends when you were 16," Bachhuber told QDaily. "Even I have trouble accepting some edible insect products. I look at them and think, okay, that's too much for me, I'm not eating that. It absolutely cannot be something like a maggot."

Wilson also chose crickets because he found Americans less frightened and less repulsed by them than by other edible insects. Still, when he first told friends, family and others what he was doing, he took a beating. "A lot of mockery, a lot of doubt — until we actually showed them the different products and let them taste," Wilson said.

Bachhuber calls those early days "honestly very strange. Progress was very slow at first, a lot of people's jaws dropped, and then a lot of friends and family came around."

To leave consumers with a better impression, Exo hired Kyle Connaughton, a chef from a Michelin-starred restaurant, to improve the flavor of its bars — designing new recipes the way you would design a new dish for a restaurant.

The other question consumers always ask is whether this protein is safe.

The UN report did not say edible insects need any special regulation: "The handling and storage of insects and insect products should follow the same hygiene and safety standards as traditional food." The US Department of Agriculture says that in the US they still need food labels listing their ingredients, and above all the insect's scientific name. Insects meant for human food must meet US cGMP standards (current Good Manufacturing Practice); insects used for pet food or animal feed cannot go into human food, and cannot be caught in the wild.

Beyond that, the US has passed no legislation written for this new industry. In late May the North American Edible Insect Coalition held its first meeting in Detroit, preparing to lobby the US government to recognize insect-based food as "Generally Recognized as Safe" (GRAS). Without that recognition, companies have a hard time both persuading local stores to stock them and dealing with local regulators.

These two problems will bother the industry for some time yet, and investors are keen anyway. This March Exo raised a $4 million Series A; Chapul, another protein bar maker, raised $50,000 in 2014. Tiny Farms, a cricket farm, raised an undisclosed seed round early this year. None of the three companies we interviewed would give their current sales, but all said they were optimistic about where edible insects are headed.

"But this isn't a business everyone is suited to invest in. Investors need to understand food and agriculture, and they have to be patient about returns," Bachhuber said. This is agriculture: Big Cricket Farms may be a startup, but it is closer to a traditional farm whose crop happens to be crickets. He stresses that his company uses modern technology yet has learned a great deal from the cricket farms that have been raising crickets as animal feed for more than 70 years. "In the end this is still husbandry. You really do it as a farmer with an animal, and it takes a farmer who truly understands the animal he raises."

They are all optimistic about the future. They also all agree it won't go mainstream anytime soon.

Cover image: Lin Yuyao, Exo

In-text images: Exo, Big Cricket Farms, Cricket Flours and waybackburgers.com