For six years now, Sarah Schlafly has been working to make crickets a popular protein choice for people. Her Mighty Cricket, founded in 2018, initially focused on persuading consumers that cricket powder is more sustainable, and more climate-friendly, than beef, chicken, or pork. But she soon realized a problem with her business plan: “The cricket supply chain is not very resilient at all.”
As Schlafly tells it, products like cricket powder need a consistent flavor profile. But the taste of crickets varies wildly. “What they’re fed, the way they’re processed, that makes a big difference,” she says. Methods of rinsing, heat treating, and milling can all affect the flavor.
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Mighty Cricket is now focused on a different project: developing methods for better and more cost-effective cricket farming, and building a processing facility to mill crickets from various farms into a powder to feed the masses. Schlafly’s St. Louis-based company—which has two and a half employees, counting herself—just got a vote of confidence from the USDA: a $650,000 Small Business Innovation Research grant to fuel its research. That’s after a previous $131,500 grant from the same program last year.
The company’s processing ambitions represent a real pivot from Schlafly’s earlier plans, and she admits the winding road led to moments of doubt. She says she’d been working to get restaurants to use her cricket powder when the pandemic forced them to shut down—so she started focusing instead on shelf-stable products that people could buy at retail outlets like grocery stores. That’s when it became clear that the cricket supply was ill-prepared for any sort of real consumer demand.
She almost gave up.
“I had this point where I was like, OK, either now is a good time to shut down, or now is a good time to take a look at what I’ve learned the past three years and figure out, Can I make an impact in this in this supply chain, in this food system?” she recalls. “I almost decided to shut down.”
That’s when she remembered why she’d gotten into crickets in the first place: She wanted to make sure her daughter, and her daughter’s daughter, would have a sustainable food source as the world changed. “That’s why I went into business,” she says. Building a sustainable cricket supply chain was one way of addressing the very problem she’d set out to solve.
Schlafly knows she’s still quite a ways away from opening a processing plant; the USDA grant is designed to facilitate research, not pay for construction. But in some ways, the timing feels perfect. Customers, she admits, are not clamoring for food products made with cricket powder—yet.
“This industry is so early, it really gives us the time to do a lot of research and kind of build up the IP and solid patents and set that as the foundation that the industry can build upon,” she says. “Meanwhile, the consumers here in the U.S., we’re slowly getting educated about bug food.”
Schlafly is working with an agriculture research facility in Mississippi that specializes in insect research. But she’s also finding help right in her own backyard. Mighty Cricket moving from a producer of consumer packaged goods to an ag-tech company opened her eyes to an industry that’s thriving locally, one where St. Louis is becoming a true hub for innovation. “I would say I was CPG and had zero interest from people as a CPG company in St. Louis. But now that we’re ag-tech, it’s like, Oh, we have all of these resources for you here. Go here and here and here.”
One of those resources has been BioSTL’s BioGenerator, which invests in and supports local biotech companies. BioGenerator helped Schlafly with grant training, connected her with experts, and gave her access to a shared lab at the Helix Center at 39 North. Says managing director Matt Helm, “Sarah and Mighty Cricket have been persistent looking at more efficient protein to introduce to the market and we are excited to see the USDA Grant as an additional endorsement of the opportunity that Mighty Cricket can capture going forward.”
Why It Matters: Schlafly is concerned that there won’t be enough quality protein to feed the United States, much less the developing world, in 30 years. She’s been focused on crickets as a solution, but insects need a resilient supply chain to be a true protein alternative. Schlalfy says, “People have been eating crickets and farming crickets in Southeast Asia for a really long time. But when it comes to the larger scale processing to put in food products, that really hasn’t been done.”
What’s Next: Schlafly will see more than one long-gestating process result in public attention this month. She competed on the Amazon original competition show Buy It Now last March, and her episode finally debuts this week. She says, “This is an exciting month for the company, and we hope to just let it snowball from here.”
