Reducing Cost, Improving Efficiency and Productivity of Farming Crickets as Food Ingredients

Reducing Cost, Improving Efficiency and Productivity of Farming Crickets as Food IngredientsAs the human population grows, it is ever more important to sustain rather than increase our levels of consumption from the earth and it's ecosphere. The market for protein is exploding. The global market for protein products was $15.2 billion in 2012. By 2017, these markets are projected to increase 30% to $20 billion dollars. Demand for protein has expanded well beyond the traditional body builder market into every area of life including weight loss, wellness, and sports nutrition among others. Yet already about 70% of agricultural land, and 30% of the total land on earth, is used to produce livestock. Thus, expanding the use of land for livestock production is neither feasible nor sustainable. The good news is farming insects, utilizes less energy, feed, land and water than other livestock at any scale (small or large). Thus, farming insects contributes less to climate change and overall pollution levels. However, farming insects such as crickets has not had the benefit of advanced farming practices, technology and innovations that other animal derived commodities have had over the past 150+ years. Insect farming has remained entirely manual, much smaller scale and largely unchanged for at least 60+ years. Due largely to lack of mechanization and innovation, these inefficiencies result in high costs and unreliable supply. Frozen crickets cost $4-$10 per pound. Compared to other protein sources, this is high. Cricket powder is at $24 per pound. Cricket powder requires 4 pounds of crickets to produce 1 pound of powder). Thus, any cost reductions in cricket production will result in a 4 fold corresponding reduction in the cost of dried products/ingredients made from them. In order to become competitive in the market, frozen cricket prices must drop to $1 per pound. The current Phase II SBIR funding will allow us to refine and commercialize our successful Phase I innovations to improve the feasibility of insects as a mainstream agricultural product and food ingredient. With those funds we will be able to: 1) improve efficiency/cost and mechanize cricket mass harvesting and freezing through refinement of our Phase I cricket harvesting/flash freezing prototype, 2) refine our Phase I prototype to produce a market-ready device to improve efficiency/cost of water delivery to crickets and 3) develop at least 5 new cricket feed formulations which will be quickly commercialized on new and existing farms.All Things Bugs LLC (www.crickepowder.com) continues to commercialize its innovations the rapidly growing human consumption market. Recently, all major news sources have covered insect as an up and coming source of food, often mentioning our company. Examples include: Huffington Post, Forbes, Fortune, Fast Company, The Newyorker, Fox News and many others. Further, as a leader in the industry in innovation and as the largest manufacturer of high quality insect based ingredients, our company is well positioned to commercialize technologies from this project. Our company has had great commercial success with its finely milled whole cricket powder (GrioproTM) (developed from other Phase I and Phase II USDA SBIR projects), including nearly half $1 million (over 10,000 pounds of cricket powder) in sales. Our product far out-performs the competition in overall quality as finer, ligher colored and overall better functionality in a wide variety of food and beverage products. It is being used by other companies in protein bars, baked goods. protein shakes, snacks, pastas and many other products on the market. We believe that these innovations will be broadly useful beyond crickets for farms producing other edible insects such as grasshoppers, mealworms and others. If successful, with this Phase II project, our company will be a step toward revolutionizing the food industry and an important change for agriculture by improving production efficiencies a