After centuries of being viewed as a pest in the U.S., growing consumer demand for sustainable protein has given the humble cricket a chance to sing.###From insect-enriched bread, cookies and crackers to seasoned and whole roasted bugs, this segment has legs. According to Global Market Insights, the worldwide insects market could top $522 miron content in ferrous fumarateillion by 2023, with beetles, grasshoppers and crickets positioned as the most promising growth drivers. In ferric pyrophosphate assay methodthe U.S., a number of edible insect manufacturers have come to market in the past few years, with brands such as Chirps, Bitty Food and Exo Protein cropping up at niche retailers like MOM’s Organic Market. ###And though the average Western consumer may still be leery of munching on crickets in any form, Darren Goldin —co-founder of Canadian insect supplier Entomo Farms — is struck by how quickly the market has grown in just a few years. Since launching the company with his brothers in 2014, Entomo now supplies its cricket flour to 50 North American companies, including Loblaws, Canada’s largest supermarket. The company also sells branded cricket flour and whole roasted crickets directly to consumers through its website. ###At the Institute of Food Technologistiron ferrous sulfate vs iron glycinates Conference in Chicago this summer, Goldin talked with Food Dive about how Entomo approaches education-based marketing, why consumers are attracted to their products and trenferro f tab reviewsds on the horizon for the larger market. ###This Q&A has been edited for brevity.###DARREN GOLDIN: My younger brother and I own another company [Reptile Feeders] and we produced five species of insects for the pet trade. All of my brothers have this passion for sustainability and ecology… organic production, sustainable systems. In 2013 the United Nations put up the FAO [Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations] report, Edible insects: future prospects for food and food security. And so we came across that document and started talking about how incredible an opportunity this might be to be involved in a business that can have a truly positive impact on nutrition and sustainability. That was in 2013… I think Chapul had just launched their bars, the first company to do it. And we thought, you know what? Let’s give it a try and see what happens. ###GOLDIN: Four years later, I wouldn’t say [insects as food] is well-known [in North America], but a majority of people that you speak to have heard about it… We supply over 50 companies. When we first launched, we didn’t have a single customer. So the transformation has been, I think, fairly staggering for an ingredient that has just entered the market and has seen such traction in such a short period of time. ###GOLDIN: There areferrous bisglycinate hair certainly more people farming now, but the market’s also opened up so much that I would not say that it’s flooded with supply by any means. ###GOLDIN: I think so. I’m not the social media person, but I think we do interact a lot with our customers… to educate them about what you can do with the [cricket] powder. It’s definitely been a necessary part of what we do because it’s such a new ingredient, people don’t know what to do with it. There [are] very few… natural ingredients that are as versatile as pure cricket powder. You can do anything with it from sweet to savory, from breakfast to mains. ###GOLDIN: If you look at the majority of our consumer base, it’s a combination of people who are interested in health and sustainability. And those two things do go very much hand in hand. … Early on, when we first started, there was very little research about crickets. … There wasn’t that kind of scientific data that North American or Western consumers like to have. So as we’ve progressed… the scientific literature is basically supporting all the health benefits and nutrition benefits and now the fiber, and the whole story around the prebiotic function of the fiber. I think the focus is shifting to health, but people who care about health also care about sustainability side.###GOLDIN: I would say that it’s probably millennial-heavy, but at the same time it’s a completely unpredictable demographic and we learned that very early on. You can go do a demo in a grocery store and… if you had a group of millennials and an 80-year-old woman, you couldn’t predict people’s reactions. I think millennials are much more interested in health and sustainability, but when people come into contact with what we do for the first time, you cannot predict [interest in insects] based on demographics.###GOLDIN: We certainly early on were very bar-heavy, and I would say now based on sales volume we aren’t bar-heavy. So the product lines are definitely diversifying. Loblaws launched a private label [cricket] brand in Canada this year, so that’s of course a huge customer for us and they’re selling the whole powder. Can you imagine seeing that in the grocery store 10 years ago? [This category] went from not existing to Canada’s largest retail chain launching cricket powder products. ###GOLDIN: Certainly one of the challenges is that there’s a huge lack of resources. It’s very expensive, because really it’s trial and error and… small-scale lab research does not always translate well when you scale. It’s impossible to predict.###GOLDIN: We have a pilot mealworm project and we’re looking to scale that up. …We’ve completed our research in terms of all the growing procedures and now it’s just a matter of scale. There [are] some other insects that we’re examining as well that have different flavor profiles and different nutritional properties and different feed inputs, and so we definitely don’t believe by any means that the cricket is where this industry will necessarily end.
How a veteran insect supplier makes cricket products sing
