🤝 Meet Darren Goldin. He’s the co-founder of Entomo Farms, North America's largest producer of crickets raised specifically for human consumption. We sat down with Darren to talk about why people are so hesitant to eat bugs, the best recipes to add crickets to, and how protein-maxxing has breathed new life into the business.
How did you and your brothers get into cricket farming?
My younger brother and I have been in the insect breeding world since about 2008, producing specifically for pet stores and zoos and research lab type places. In 2013, the United Nations published a report on food security, looking at population growth and analyzing how we're going to feed another couple of billion people by the year 2050. It found that most of our arable land is already used to produce feed grains, like corn and soy and oats, to feed cattle, and there really was not a lot more capacity for growing feed grains. Then they looked at the way that different animals convert those grains into body mass or protein, and insects are pretty much the most efficient converters of grain into protein. They addressed crickets and mealworms specifically, I think, but insects in general are much more efficient than mammals and birds at doing that.
We already had a cricket farm going, so we decided to open up a second one, at a fairly small scale, separate from the one that was making it for the live pet food industry, with stricter protocols on the hygiene side, for the human food market. It was kind of a leap of faith. We started to farm the crickets and turn them into a powder. And that's kind of how it started. The rest is history.
What would be your elevator pitch to a Canadian to try to convince them to try a cricket-based food?
There are two types of people that are attracted to our products: those who are fully health-focused — they don't care what it is, they just care whether or not it's good for them — and then people who are really conscious about eating stuff that is environmentally sustainable. We don't really try to convince people who have no interest in either of those things to eat crickets, because it's a really hard sell to North American people. If either of those things are of interest to you, then we could probably convince you to at least give it a try.
Why are crickets such a tough sell to a North American?
People have really strong cultural relationships with food. It would be like trying to convince an East Indian person to eat a cow. It's just culturally taboo. For whatever reason, North Americans have this perception that insects are gross. One of the things we would say early on is, “North Americans will carve a chunk of flesh off a cow's behind, and that's not gross. But somehow a cricket is gross.” It's not something that's logical. It doesn't really make any sense. As you're brought up, you're taught what is food and what is not food.
From a biological, evolutionary perspective, that's a really important part of being a human animal — knowing what you can eat and what you can't eat, because there are lots of things that can kill you. So that part of our brain, I think, is very difficult to adjust if you don't grow up with it culturally.
You’ve said that the cricket could do for bugs what the California roll did for sushi. Why do you think crickets are this gateway bug of sorts?
In terms of insects, Western culture has a much friendlier perception of crickets. You have characters like Jiminy Cricket, and crickets chirp on a warm summer evening. It's just not like a maggot or a grub or a worm. For whatever reason, there's a less negative association with crickets compared to other insects.
Is the recent obsession with all things protein opening up more minds to something like a cricket-based powder?
I definitely think so, but within certain market segments. We have a lot of repeat customers that are high-end athletes from every discipline who don't really care what the product is. They care only about what it will do for their body. They're looking for the cleanest protein they can get. Alternatives like whey protein are not really healthy for humans. Whey is inflammatory, it's not a great source of protein for humans. So athletes who are trying to pound the protein are a significant part of our customer base.
When you look at the nutritional profile of the cricket powder, it's not just protein. It is 60% protein, but it's also got omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids. It's got calcium, iron, and magnesium. And it also has a lot of prebiotic fibre. The exoskeleton of the cricket, the shell, is made up of a compound called chitin, and that's basically a prebiotic fibre. It supports the good microbes in the gut.
What goes into the process of producing 10 million crickets per week?
Our operation is unique because we do what we call free-range farming. Cricket farming typically is done in plastic bins of whatever size. We did that in the beginning, and then we were looking to expand; I decided to convert old chicken barns. That was one of those aha moments for me: if we want to be able to scale cricket farming, we're going to have to think outside the box. And that's where we came up with the free-range farming system.
The chicken barns have two floors, 10,000 square feet each, and each floor is fully open. We have a vertical structure that is a combination of water source, feed source, and what we call the cricket condos. That's really just cardboard, like when you buy a case of wine and it has those cardboard dividers in there. The cells are much smaller, but the purpose is just to create more surface area. The floor of the barn is only 10,000 square feet, but you add that vertical, cell-like structure and you multiply that surface area.
How does cricket farming differ from other animals?
One really interesting difference, from an ethics perspective, between crickets and other animals is that we harvest crickets at the end of their natural life. With chickens, we harvest at 35 days, and that animal will live three or four years. Cows, we harvest at a year, 18 months, and that animal will live 20 years. Crickets literally lay their eggs and die. Insect life cycles are just very, very different.
When you get to the end of the farming cycle, when the crickets are mature, we put out trays of wet dirt and the females naturally flock to those trays and lay their eggs in them. The next morning, we harvest the eggs, those go up to the incubator, and then we start harvesting the crickets. So it's a perpetual cycle. We never buy eggs and we never buy crickets.
What's the most fun and the most challenging part about owning a business with your two brothers?
We are all incredibly close, and we get along really, really well. My younger brother Ryan and I have been in business together since we were teenagers. We started off doing window washing and student painting in the summers, and we just always worked together. We've found through the years that that is actually not fantastic as a business partnership, because we think so much alike that we don't challenge each other.
When we got into business with Jared, my older brother, we realized that he does not fit into that same business mind. And that was challenging, getting used to always being challenged. It's just the kind of person he is. He thinks very differently from how we think, but even if he thought the same, he's still one of those guys who would poke at you and challenge you, just to see. It was amazing because it helped me think about things in different ways. It's not "yahoo, drinking beer" fun, but it was a very cool experience to do that with three brothers. We got to do trade shows together, and we had a lot of really fantastic times because of the business.
How many crickets do you personally eat in a week?
I probably eat crickets two times a week now. Most of the time I'm putting them in yogurt in the morning. I'll mix some in with yogurt, then add a little bit of honey, sometimes some fruit. I just like that combination of flavours. And I'd probably eat 100 or 150 crickets per serving, if I was going to guess.
When my kids were younger, if we were making pancakes, I'd add a couple of tablespoons of cricket powder to the pancake mix. It darkened it up a little bit, but I didn't hide it from them. They didn't care, because they grew up with it as normal. Same thing if you bake cookies. Or in the winter, I'll make lots of chili, and I'll add the beef and all the vegetables, and then a few heaping tablespoons of the powder.
What do you think is the tastiest way to eat crickets?
It depends. Some people really like the umami, maybe a bit earthy, flavour of the cricket, and some people are not that crazy about it. So it depends if you're trying to hide it or if you enjoy it. You can put a meaningful amount in a batch of chocolate chip cookies and you won't even taste it. The chocolate flavour and the way it coats your mouth is strong enough that you won't even know it's in there. But my favourite is yogurt. I just love that combination of the yogurt and the honey, and sometimes I'll put some peanut butter in there as well. You can still taste that earthy, umami flavour, but it's not overpowering.
Is it inevitable that we'll all be eating bugs eventually given the environmental impact of other animals?
That's a tough question. I think at some point it will become necessary for humans to augment the amount of traditional proteins that we eat. I don't think cows or chickens should go away. The reality is just that the whole planet cannot eat steak for dinner every night. So it will become an important part of a sustainable planet. It might be crickets, or it might be some other insect that someday, for whatever reason, tastes better or is even more efficient than crickets. We really are at the tip of the iceberg in this whole paradigm shift in how humans feed themselves and in our relationship with food.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
