How do you make ground-up crickets taste good?
The answer may be just a sprinkling of ginger and ras el hanout, a North African spice blend. And there’s always chocolate.
Greg Sewitz, 22, and Gabi Lewis, 23, began making protein bars out of crickets when they were roommates at Brown University. Mr. Lewis, a philosophy major who tried to follow a paleo diet (eating what our cave-man ancestors presumably ate and minimizing his intake of processed, sugary foods), couldn’t find a bar that fit his dietary needs. “They were all like candy,” he said.
When Mr. Sewitz, a cognitive neuroscience major, attended a conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at which one of the speakers discussed insects as a sustainable food source, an idea was born.
According to the two men’s research, the insects are 69 percent protein by dry weight as compared with 31 percent for chicken breast and 29 percent for sirloin steak; they provide more iron than beef does and nearly as much calcium as milk. They produce one-eightieth the amount of methane that cattle do, and need one-twelfth their feed, based on 100-gram portions of each. And they can reproduce quickly and don’t require acres of grassland to graze.
The roommates ordered a box of crickets from a farm that raises the insects for reptile feed and fishing bait. They overcame the ick factor of freezing them, roasting them and blending them in a Vitamix. “There were cricket parts all over the place, and our roommates got a little weirded out,” Mr. Sewitz said.
But their reward was their first batch of cricket flour, a dusty brown substance that resembled brown sugar and didn’t taste like much. They combined it with almonds, dates for binding, honey for sweetness and raw cacao nibs for crunch.
“Our friends would come back to our house late, after a night of drinking,” Mr. Sewitz said, “and we’d have these bars in the fridge and they’d just devour them.”
After graduating in May 2013, the men, having by then moved to New York, decided to make their hobby a business called Exo (for exoskeleton). They turned to Kickstarter, aiming to raise $20,000 in a month. They hit their goal in three days.
Providing snacks for drunken college students is one thing. They then had to figure out how to make the snacks palatable to a wider, sober audience. They knew they needed a culinary specialist’s touch.
A mutual friend introduced them to Kyle Connaughton, 37, the former head of research and development for the Fat Duck in Bray, England, one of the most acclaimed restaurants in the world, known for pushing the culinary envelope. Mr. Connaughton was well qualified to become the third cricketeer: He and Heston Blumenthal, the Fat Duck’s owner, had once created a dish of fried mealworms and crickets injected with a mixture of mayonnaise and onion gel.
Mr. Connaughton, now a consultant at the Culinary Institute of America, has long been interested in sustainability and insect culture. He agreed to be Exo’s culinary adviser and developed recipes that made sure each bar contained 10 grams of protein, the equivalent of about 40 crickets, or six to eight crickets per bite.
Along with the original cacao nut flavor, the first line, scheduled for release on the Exo website in February, will feature peanut butter and jelly, and cashew ginger (made with powdered ginger, salt and ras el hanout).
The two partners plan to sell the bars in natural-food stores and CrossFit-type gyms — places that attract the growing number of paleo lifestyle enthusiasts, who were among their Kickstarter supporters. They are available for pre-order online.
Exo is one of a handful of cricket protein bar companies. Other entries include Chapul, which sells cricket bars made with chocolate and cayenne, and Bitty Foods, which is working on a line of cricket flour products. Both have a stated sustainability mission, but Mr. Sewitz believes that the tastiest offering will win over consumers.
“At the end of the day, it’s a protein bar,” he said. “If it’s sustainable, that’s great, but it’s going in your body and you want to know that it’s good for you and tastes delicious.”