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