Edible Insects Are Crawling to a Plate Near You

Packaged foods with bugs as ingredients have been a popular topic in Western countries during the past three years, and now the conversation is creeping into Asia.

In Thailand, edible insects are now poised on supermarket shelves.Bugsolutely, founded in 2015 in Bangkok, is part of therapidly growing market of ‘bug food’with its cricket pasta product—the only pasta in the world containing 20 percent cricket flour, it claims.

Marketing it as a “superfood with high protein content” and “very low environmental impact”, the cricket pasta hasthe same selling pointas Exo’s cricket protein bars, whichKotaro Sasamoto ofDentsu Venturesdescribed as “a granola bar with a hint of cricket”.

“It may sound a bit strange, but it’s one of our ‘next big thing’ projects,” Sasamoto said last year at a Cannes Lions seminar. “Processing protein from crickets is more efficient than doing the same from pigs and cows, and alleviates food shortage issues in the world.” Dentsu Ventures is an investment arm of Japan’s advertising giant that last yearstaked an undisclosed sum in New York-based Exo.

Massimo Reverberi, founder of Bugsolutely, speaking at theFood and Beverage Innovation Forum 2017in Shanghai last week, made a similar case for insects as an alternative source of protein, and insect-based consumer packaged goods (CPG)being the next big market.

Citing a2013 report from the United Nations, he said edible insects may be a solution for the lack of protein to feed the world’s population of 9 billion people come 2025.

The global edible insects market size is set to exceedUS$522 million by 2023,as per a report by Global Market Insights, with Thailand, China and Vietnam of note within Asia, though the projected figure also includes using insects for animal feed and not just human sustenance.

Oft-mentioned Exo is at the forefront of bug-based food, and was successful in convincing VCs, including Dentsu Ventures, to invest US$5.6 million from two rounds of financing. But being an Italian by birth,Reverberi does not consider it as “real food that can be put on the table”.

“I think this energy bar is a very strange thing from the United States,” he said. Europeans, like himself, “do not want to eat this kind of rubbish”, but pasta is different. Pasta is a staple food, he categorised. What’s fancy about cricket pasta is the cricket flour mixed into it.

Such snacks buzz in a considerable amount of sales onecommerce platformsand has maintained sustained growth, she said, to the tune of tens of thousands RMB per month from a relatively small minority of consumers.

Given there is little advertising or promotion for such fried silkworm snacks (like the one pictured above), this is very rare, she said.

Pesign’s own consumer research found dichotomous attitudes to the notion of insect food: either love (“I simply like the taste; it’s very crispy”) or hate (“There is no way for me to stomach this; even if you let me eat feces I will not eat insects”) in an extreme way.

It is undeniable that many younger consumers, even in adventurous China, are resistant to critters and larvae, and cannot fathom opening their mouths to touch such “weird” and “strange” food, she said. It is precisely because of this that Liu recommends insect-food manufacturers to “turn the foreign into the common” through creative packaging.

Because eating habits are often developed since childhood, any resistance is in fact a psychological barrier against “foreign” concepts of food, she said. To remove that barrier, detailed shapes of insects should not be visible on packaging.

However, completely avoiding the shape of insects has a drawback, she stressed, as it diminishes the core advantages of insects containing more protein than beef, more calcium than milk or more iron than spinach. After all, the most important purpose of packaging is to be a bridge of communication between the brand and the buyer, she said.

Rather, a very “intuitive” design in a form of a sketch or a cartoon (pictured below) is best, she advised. Liu gave the example of how the mouse, before the emergence of Mickey, was reviled by everyone.