Could tiny crickets make a mighty impact?

Even before Sarah Schlafly launched her protein powder company Mighty Cricket, she was passionate about nutrition and cooking. She wanted Americans to eat more healthfully, so she started a small mobile cooking school, figuring that teaching people how to prepare nutritious food would be a good way to follow her passion. While teaching classes, she began to see a correlation between income and obesity. She started working with people who were on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. It was easy to get decent produce, rice, and other whole grains on a budget. It was harder to find protein—ideally grass-fed, free-range types of protein—at a good price point.

And then Schlafly found edible insects—specifically, crickets, as a protein source.

Yes, bugs. But consider these facts: By 2050, the population is expected to swell to 9.8 billion, according to the United Nations. To feed that population, the world needs to increase food production by 70 percent, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. Increasing that food supply—especially protein—by traditional agricultural means would put a strain on natural resources. One-fifth of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, and more than half of that comes from animal farming. (As is oft-cited, if you moved all of the world’s cows to a private island, the new Cow Island would be the country with the second most greenhouse gas emissions. China would still be the first.) It takes about 2,000 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of beef. Cows require land and a lot of feed.

“We cannot have nine billion people on an animal protein–rich diet in 2050,” wrote José Graziano Da Silva, the director-general of the FAO in a report titled “Feeding the World Sustainably.” (The FAO even published a book called Edible Insects: Future Prospects for Food and Feed Security in 2013.)

Knowing the world could be 29 short years away from a food-production problem, Schlafly thought crickets could be one way to help solve it. Crickets contain more protein than beef—68 grams to beef’s 30 per 100-gram serving. It also only takes about 1 gallon of water to make 1 pound of cricket protein. The insects require less feed and space, and emit fewer greenhouse gases, too.

There was just one issue: “I was really wary because I didn’t want to eat insects,” Schlafly says. “The concept made sense. But I really did not want to eat a bug because I found them disgusting—the thought of it.”

She remembered back to her cooking classes, about how she took foods that kids see as gross—such as kale—and turned them into dishes they liked. “In one of my cooking classes, we made kale chips, and the kids love them,” she says. “And I was like, ‘Wow, it’s just a simple refabrication of the raw ingredient into a delicious dish that makes people want it.’”

And then there’s this: We’re likely already eating bugs. The Food and Drug Administration allows for a tiny bit of insect remnants in processed foods. Peanut butter, for instance, is considered contaminated if it has an average of 30 or more insect fragments per 100 grams.

“We just don’t realize it because it’s processed and mixed up in our foods,” Schlafly says. “So any processed food—whether it’s flour or peanut butter or chocolate or coffee—it all has bugs in it. I thought, If we just mill the insects into a powder, it’s like all the other processed foods we eat.”

That’s when Mighty Cricket was born. Schlafly launched in 2018 with the comfort foods oatmeal and chocolate, which she describes as a gateway to introducing new ingredients into people’s diets. The first week working with the cricket powder, she was squeamish, but she got used to it quickly. Now she can eat whole roasted insects. “It doesn’t even faze me,” she says. “I think it’s amazing that within a year I went from ‘I would never eat that’ to ‘Oh, yeah—load me up.’”

Mighty Cricket now offers instant oatmeal, pancake and waffle mix, protein powder, and chocolate via its website and through retailers Local Harvest in Tower Grove South, The Annex in Webster Groves, City Greens Market in The Grove, and the Alpine Shop in Kirkwood.

Schlafly was working with a local cricket farm, but after it shut down, she’s trying to revive it herself to keep that local connection. She hopes to vertically integrate one day. She’s also applied for the Arch Grants Startup Competition, which awards startups with $50,000 and other resources if they headquarter their business in St. Louis for a year.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Schlafly also started looking into the export market. Consuming insects, or entomophagy, isn’t a new concept. It’s estimated that edible insects—of which there are more than 1,900 species—are a part of the diets of 2 billion people worldwide. Through her travels in Asia and Central America, Schlafly saw U.S. trends emulated there. She thought that if she could get edible insects to take off in the States, countries that already have a history of insect-eating would follow. She’s now focusing on e-commerce and penetrating high-end food retailers such as Whole Foods Market.

“Here in the U.S., I think that once we get this to go mainstream, it can have a powerful ripple effect around the world,” Schlafly says. “U.S. citizens are uniquely positioned to make one of the mightiest impacts in the world. Most people don’t realize that. I didn’t realize that until I started traveling to Asia and Central America.” GNC has already shown interest in Mighty Cricket’s protein powders. The vitamins and supplements chain has 620 retail stores in Mexico, a country with a history of entomophagy.

To try to capture that American audience, Schlafly wants to tap culinary ingenuity—and there’s a precedent for it. As author Trevor Corson recounts in The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice, sushi became more palatable to Americans once an unknown chef-genius moved the seaweed wrapper to the inside of the roll and dotted the outside with rice, a more familiar food. A young fishmonger from Los Angeles named Lee Lantz was the first, in the 1970s, to take an ugly gray toothfish caught off the coast of Valparaíso and transform it with an exotic name: Chilean sea bass.

Schlafly recognizes that it’s going to take more than edible insects alone to build a more sustainable world. But it could be one of many solutions.

“I see Mighty Cricket as a very powerful solution,” she says. “We’re making it pretty easy for customers. If you buy a high-protein oatmeal, you can easily choose to buy it fortified with protein derived from crickets. In doing so, you’re automatically saving 500 gallons of water or emitting five times fewer carbon greenhouse gases.

“In that way, it’s everyone doing their part.”