The company has seen a tenfold increase in production with the system. Each bin is monitored with the company’s own sensor technology, and each aspect of the cricket’s life, from hatching to harvest, is automated as much as possible. The crickets mate and lay eggs in a dedicated breeding space, and then the hatched eggs are moved to a bin where they grow until harvest. “That may work, but it’s definitely a very inefficient and not an appropriate way to deliver food in a cricket-centric way.” Using analytics, the company was also able to modify the cricket’s diet to produce a higher-quality end product with more protein and fewer carbs. “You end up dumping a very significant amount of food at the end of the day and hope that it will last overnight,” says Ashour.

Right now, “insect protein products sold in North America are a premium product.” In the past, farmers worked standard business hours crickets are nocturnal. The new system uses a robotic module that travels around the farm, depositing the ideal amount of food sensors use machine learning and AI to monitor how the insects eat and when they need more. The company’s original facility required staff to walk around a vertical farm multiple times a day, feeding bins full of crickets on multiple racks. While non-cricket protein powders vary in price, a pound of a cheap powder can wholesale for as little as $10.Īspire’s team spent time studying how crickets respond biologically to intensive production, and then began focusing on cost-effectiveness. That’s not because of an artificial, significantly inflated gross margin–that’s simply because the cost of production is very high.” A pound of cricket powder includes between 4,200 and 4,800 crickets. A pound of cricket protein powder right now at wholesale sells for approximately $20. “I have not had a single person pass on trying the crickets when we did it.” Right now, “insect protein products sold in North America are a premium product,” says Mohammed Ashour, CEO of Aspire, which launched in 2013 after the founders–students at the time–won the $1 million Hult Prize for their business plan for edible insects. Aspire believes its farms can make that possible. But for insect food to fulfill its sustainable promise of supplying protein without the massive carbon and land footprint of beef, it will have to be much more widely available, and more affordable. For a few years, it’s been possible to buy cricket snacks such as protein bars made with cricket flour or cricket chips (like Chirps) at some grocery stores or online. Eating bugs–or at least products made from bugs–has been growing in popularity.

Cricket bug