How 50 Million Crickets Are Harvested A Week To Become Food

• Every single part of the cricket is edible and it has nutrients like fiber, iron and calcium.

• To produce just one kilogram of cow meat takes a staggering 22,000 liters of water.
• To produce that same amount of protein from a cricket takes only a few hundred liters.
• The Entomo barns can produce 9,000 pounds of protein a week which could meet the daily protein requirements of about 80,000 people.

Narrator: There are about 15 million crickets in this room. Here, they'll live out their lives freely, until they're transformed into food.

Darren Goldin: The purpose of the condos is to give the crickets somewhere to live. And so generally they are resting inside the condos. They'll come up, have a drink of water, have some food, and then go back down to rest again. It's difficult to perceive how many crickets are actually in a room like this, because of course, they were all living inside their happy little condos. We just take the condo, give it a bang, and all the crickets come out.

Narrator: Most of these crickets will be milled into a powder that can be used like flour.

Reporter: Mmm, it's good. You can't even taste the cricket.

Narrator: Or you can snack on them whole like chips.

Reporter: Mmm.

Narrator: This one is barbecue-flavored. Though you may be thinking this is a strange choice for food, crickets actually contain more protein than beef without any of the environmental damage.

Lauren Keegan: A lot of manufacturers and entrepreneurs were looking for safer, more sustainable protein sources to add to their product. And for us, it's been quite a boon to our business as a result.

Narrator: We went inside Canada's Entomo Farms to see how they turn crickets from bugs to brunch.

Narrator: For most of us, crickets are just the soundtrack of our summer nights. But Darren Goldin and his brother saw they could be used to create a new source of sustainable and nutritious food.

Darren: Just reimagining how we can feed a population of 9 or 10 billion people on an overcrowded planet.

Narrator: Now they harvest about 50 million crickets a week, and they're aiming to triple production within the year.

Darren: The trickiest thing is that there's no real manual in terms of this kind of scale and density. There's no manual. It's figure it out as you go. Nobody's ever done free-range cricket farming on this kind of a scale before.

Narrator: It all starts here, where the crew covers boards with a mixture of damp soil and peat moss. Making mud pies.

Narrator: And the pregnant females flock to lay their eggs. It may look like just dirt and some grains of rice, but actually ...

Darren: There's probably thousands and thousands of cricket eggs in there.

Narrator: And in this room, about 15 million eggs. Of the 900 different species Darren could choose from, he chose the tropical house cricket because of its simple feed requirements.

Darren: It's a cricket that does well in high densities, grows really fast, and is a super delicious cricket.

Narrator: Every single part of this cricket is edible. Plus they have nutrients like fiber, iron, and calcium. After roughly nine days, the eggs hatch, and they'll hang in the nursery for about two weeks.

Darren: Crickets definitely require a nice, warm environment, being cold-blooded animals, and their metabolism is controlled by temperature. So if you keep them on the warmer end of their preferred temperature, they grow faster. And then once they're big enough and ready to handle life in the big grow room, then we transfer them from the nursery into the grow room.

Narrator: It only takes a crew of five to maintain this colony of millions. The crickets here eat a mixture of corn, soy, and some flax. On average, the crickets dine on almost 1,000 pounds of feed a day.

Darren: That's often staggering for people, because you think of crickets as such tiny little animals. But of course, when you've got 10 or 15 million of them, they consume a fair amount of feed.

Narrator: To put it in human terms, 15 million crickets is nearly twice the population of New York City. But growing all these crickets is still more sustainable than farming pigs, poultry, or cattle. To produce just 1 kilogram of cow meat takes a staggering 22,000 liters of water. And to produce that same amount of protein from a cricket, only a few hundred liters. Growing crickets also has other advantages.

Darren: So one of the interesting things about insects is that there's very, very few diseases that are transferable from insects to humans, which is very different from farming mammals or chickens. And crickets do not have any known viruses, or the species that we produce has no known viruses that can affect them. And of course, certainly no zoonotic viruses, or viruses that can cross species.

Narrator: These three Entomo barns can produce 9,000 pounds of protein a week, enough to fill the daily protein requirements of 80,000 people.

Lauren: By and large, most of our customers, they're integrating it into a finished good, like a dog kibble, a dog treat, or selling it as cricket powder under a different brand, or putting it in something like a super food smoothie mix, baking it into other baked goods and other snacks.

Narrator: Even their poop is a usable product.

Darren: And as you can see, the floor is covered with cricket manure.

Narrator: It's called frass, and it's a great fertilizer. The farm can produce about 6,000 pounds of manure per harvest. These crickets will live out their full life span before they're turned into food.

Darren: So from the time an egg hatches to harvest is about six weeks. The big difference is that at six weeks, a cricket is fully mature, it's lived out its life, it's bred and laid eggs for us, and essentially it would be dying within a few days anyway.

Narrator: And now it's time to see them turned into food.

Kate McInnes: So this is our raw receiving room. All of the crickets come in from the farm.

Narrator: The insects are rinsed, then sorted to make sure there's no debris from the farm in the mix. Next, they're evenly spread onto trays and slipped into ovens to roast.

Kate: So in order to make the powder the moisture has to be below a certain percentage. We find that if it's above that percentage. We find that if it's above that percentage it's really difficult to grind it.

Narrator: While some are left whole and sent for seasoning and packaging, the majority will go into this industrial grinder until they look like coffee.

Kate: We do a quick 30-second blitz to break it up.

Narrator: It's then manually packed into boxes of 25 pounds each. Every day, they turn 15,000 crickets into 500 pounds of powder.

Darren: The secret sauce is really in the metrics. It's in exactly how your setup is done, your ratio of eggs, surface area of feed. And it's kind of like a big giant recipe, and everything does have to be perfect for it to function the way that we function.

Narrator: But there is still room for improvement. Right now, the process of Entomo Farms is mostly manual, and that's going to need to change if they want to ramp up production.

Kate: And so we're looking at more automated solutions, which will allow us to actually produce three to four times what we are capable of doing now.

Narrator: Entomo Farms hopes this will bring costs down and make their products more affordable. Cricket flour sells for roughly $12 for every four ounces, which is 45 times the price of all-purpose flour. But it's not really the price that's holding back some customers.

Lauren: Perception in North America around insects as food is certainly a challenge, and it's one that we are striving to rise up against.

Narrator: In Asia, crickets are already a popular food, and Darren is confident the appetite for crickets is only going to grow.

Darren: Super exciting thing about insect farming is scale-up is super fast. Each cricket lays 600 eggs or so. And so in a crisis event, if we needed to scale up our production, we can do it really, really fast.