Innovation

The innovation starts with the process in which crickets are harvested and grown since they are born to the stage where they are big enough to be grinded up and turned into what they call cricket flour. Griyum innovated by finding through research that dried crickets have great concentration of protein and fiber in them, so by finding a niche of people that look for a healthy nutrition that could eat insects they were able to create a demand that was not there before.

Inspiration

For the past couple of years a lot of people have been beginning to be aware of the negative impact that animal consumption and animal raising are making to our world. Cattle raising is one of the industries that consumes more water and generates more CO2 on a world basis, also the rate at which humanity is fishing, will eventually extinguish many of the species that we eat now a days. With all this new ways of food consumption, Griyum decided to look for a way to keep supplying the demand for healthy and high protein foods while not having a negative impact on the environment.

Overall impact

For every gram of protein obtained from beef protein you only need 4% of the land and 0.05% of water used for obtaining the same gram of protein but from cricket harvesting. Also the harvesting of crickets generates only 1% of the CO2 generated by cattle raising (taking the ratio of 1 gram of cricket protein per 1 gram of cattle protein).

Business benefit

Griyum benefits from this innovation since they can use it as a final product differentiator when selling their product to their clients. People involved in the food and beverage industry know very well that the tendency of consumers that look for more sustainable products is in high demand and growing everyday. The fact of selling a product that is more sustainable than the competition gives Griyum a fair advantage promoting and trying to sell their product to new markets.

The fact that the crickets are sold in a powder presentation gives the customer a lot of flexibility into what they can use it to create a final product. As we talked with Alejandro, he told us that some of their costumers use it to make beverages, toasted snacks or even sauces. The fact of selling the product in a powder presentation gives a lot of benefits for the use of the consumers.

One other business benefit that the costs of cricket harvesting may drop when making bigger batches since it reacts to economies of scale. So as the demand and sales in Griyum will continue to grow, the costs of production will drop and therefore the profit will be bigger with each sale.

Social and environmental benefit

This innovation benefits society by creating a learning curve, what we mean with this is that by learning how to harvest crickets and turning them into powder in a matter of weeks can create a know-how that can be passed to communities of low resources that are looking for sustainable ways of getting a good nutrition for an affordable price.

With the know how that Griyum is getting from all this years of cricket harvesting, they have started a campaign in which they are teaching poor communities to grow their own crickets. This way the small communities will learn how to harvest them themselves and therefore they will be able to become more self-sufficient.

Interview

Alejandro de la Brena, CEO & Co-Founder