A casual glance at economic news might make you think the world is going to the dogs. But what if it was going to the bugs and the maggots. Economic forces like climate change and population growth have a new generation of farmers scouring the globe for fresh sources of protein. The edible insect market may exceed one billion dollars in five years, and along the way diffuse a potential food crisis.
Welcome to Benchmark. I'm Daniel Moss, columnist at Bloomberg Opinion in New York, and Dame Scott landman and economics editor with Bloomberg News in Washington. Two guests today come at the boom in gastronomy from different places. First will be joined by Olympia Yaga, who at North Carolina for Canberra, where she's CEO of go Tera. Go Tera builds mobile insect farming systems. In June. I ate some worms and crocodile at an event with Olympia. The worms were fine,
croc was a bit dodgy. Our second guest is Agnesca to Susa, who covers commodities and agriculture for Bloomberg News in London with two colleagues. She recently wrote an article called Bugs Are Coming Soon to your dinner table. First, let's go to our intrepid Australian insect farmer, Olympia. Why don't we start by describing your role in this emerging constellation of the insect gastronomy. Sure, so, I'm the founder and CEO of a company called go Tera that manages
food waste using insects in robotic modular systems. And I'm also the chairwoman of the Insect Protein Association of Australia, which is the national representative body for insect farmers and insect retailers in Australia and Olympia. When you talk about insect farming insect protein, what kind of insects are we actually talking about? That both the ones that you do
and other people in your association have been working with. Yes, So, for insects for food, the big three are meal worms, and there's a couple of different types of meal worm, cricket, and in that group you could probably put your locusts in your grasshopper, and then cockroach or beetle. And then there's some other novel ones where people grow sort of spiders or scarabs and things like that. But those three the most conventional that people farm in commercial quantities, both
in Australia and around the world. So the cockroaches that I've seen walking around various apartments, that I've let those become food? Is that what you're talking about? How does that happen? You are a cockroach farmer without realizing it. Yeah, they Yes, those are the cockroaches that we're talking about. They are actually really clean. And this is sort of an interesting segue into the culture of insects and how
we perceive what insects are. So they're always being considered dirty things, but cockroaches as as an animal are actually quite clean, and they have a very distinct flavor that is appealing, and they're mostly turned into a meal which people use as a flower substitute. Okay, So just so we're clear on this, are we at the point where we will soon be able to walk into Whole Foods or Woolworths or Tesco or Carrap and say, hey, where's the aisle that has the cockroach flour? How far off
is that? I don't think we're that far away at all. The challenge for any new industry, but in this case, this industry is the commercial capacity to produce commodity for fm CG. So what is fm CG. So fm CG is fast moving consumer goods. So those are chips, cakes, muffins, you know, the things that we buy as snacks and things, and so those you've got to farm enough insects for
your products to become mainstream. And so the industry is merging and we're getting more farmers and more farmers are getting to commercial capacity, and so that's a barrier to becoming mainstream. If you can't make enough product to even get shelf space in the more conventional stores, you're not going to be able to move there. I think we're probably less than two years away from cricket products being found in aisles of our sort of your more traded
Joe whole food type places. Isn't what you make now? Is that more for for livestock use as it is it going to animal feed and that sort of thing. Yes, So intec farming does lend itself to being used for for livestock feed. And there are people go Terror is
one of them that farms insects for livestock feed. But the opportunities is equally spit so there's just as much opportunity to raise insects for livestock feed based on wage substrates that make you that are available, that should be used, that should be utilized as a resource um as there is for insects to be farmed for human can assumption. I think you have hit on a point that's accurate,
and it is a challenge of the industry. Is that for centuries, insects are bad is a deeply ingrained understanding in pretty much most of most cultures, and that is a barrier to consumption or adoption. Is that cultural conversation and how do we bring these products to market when we've been told for our whole lives that having an
insect in your food is really bad. But I don't think that that's as unsurmountable a challenge as as actually the farming side, to be perfectly frank, I think the farming getting people to commercial capacity in an industry that's as new as it is, is actually the greater challenge. Now, at an event at the Australian National University, you were a panist, I was there. We dined, among other things,
on crocodile loin, on seaweed. That's before we got to the worms which were an optional extra to talk about the croc not typically something urban nights would eat. What's the appeal there and is it broadly part of the same movement that gets us bug astronomy? Yeah, I think you know, Australians have been eating crocodile what since the nineties, but it's never really taken I don't know if it's
ever really made it into mainstream. You can find it in your regular grocery stores, but it's not like there's not lots of it. There's just sort of a little bit off to the side. But yeah, I think the challenge with food is we don't know how to cook it. Our parents teach us how to cook or our peers and and so that our understanding of what to cook and what we bring into our homes when we leave
home is generally what we've been taught. And so culturally, you know, Greek and so I was raised on Greek type foods and that's what I teach my children how to make. And so when confronted by crocodile, don't know what to do with it, it showed actually to be frank I found not that you were responsible for preparing that meal, but but you know, you've brought me to my next point, which is, you know, the meal worms that were an optional extra. I indulged in them, and
I found them pretty unoffensive. It wasn't the world's strongest taste, but they were okay. I found at that meal the crocodile to be pretty ordinary, fairly tasteless, quite rubbery and texture. Now, after leaving lunch, walking back to the main conference session, I did feel a certain spring in my step. Were those worms doing something for me that I was not aware of as I ate them? Obviously, I think you would probably luck just glad to be moving, most likely
because that was quite a dense meal. The meal webs are sixty A protein, and so maybe you ingested extra protein you felt better for it. But I don't know if I should take full responsibility for your demeanor after lunch. The crocodile. I think it was a true example of the challenges of new things. It wasn't cooks particularly well. That's not normally how crocodile tastes um. But you know, if you aren't used to dealing with that meat, it's
quite hard to manage it. And it's the same you know, if I gave meal worms to somebody who'd never eat them to it before, how would they know how to cook it? So I think that's where you're using the product in fastness. Moving consumer goods is easier because it's already conveyed in a product that you can consume. We can put it into chips and bars and things, and
that makes sense to us. We already eat those things. Um, and it sort of is a good entry as far as you're looking at market demographics, because you're generally paleo eaters or vegan eaters or slow food eaters. Those people who have already committed to specific types of eating are more readily engaged in adopting new products that fit their ethos, not necessarily their palates or what they like to eat.
So so one more question from me, Olympia, if I heard you correctly earlier, you said that you're not necessarily worried about demand in your line of business. It's more the supply, getting the capacity for farming to meet what you think is going to be strong demand. What is business like in your company and in your industry? Is it? Is it growing at a very rapid rate? Can you can you give us any numbers? Sure? So the industry globally is expected to both in food, so insects for
food production and in sex for feed production. Both expect to have a hundred percent growth over the next two years to both reach a billion dollar industry, and so that's pretty speedy given how long the industry has been around.
And those things are about the fact that we've got farms in Canada and Europe and the US who are currently at commercial commodity capacity and can produce those commercial commodity quantities, and so we're now seeing these products get to market for people to consume, and that's lifting the entire industry as it goes Olympia. What role are robots playing in your business? Yeah, so we have designed a
robotic modular system for farming insects. The nature of Australian and agriculture and how the demographic of our land mass, how we are spread out with with cities quite far distances from each other, and we have these regional hubs that are almost isolated, so you'll drives and suddenly there's fifty people living in the middle of nowhere. When you consider using insects to eat waste or waste streams, that means you it's a better option to move b where the waste is than it is to be trying to
truck waste to you, so you can raise insects. So I created a robotic system to farm insects on site where waste is created. It can form either black soldier fly or meal worm, and we will be commercializing that product in the next d eighteen months and getting it
out into trials. But what that will mean for us and our goal of where these end up being is that we can put them under shopping malls where large volumes of waste, certain food waste, of being thrown away, and they can consume that waste on site using insects without the need for human interaction or human intervention, which is generally where you find challenges with employment and certainly manually raising insects on food waste is not economically viable
in an industrialized world country. So robots managing food waste under shopping malls. So this is an instance where robots are assisting you with your disruption of the food industry. Yes, so we're disrupting waste management, which is an industry that hasn't been disrupted in its existence. So even though we
have different ways of managing waste. Bioreactors and all those different new methods, we still pick up waste from one location and drag it or truck it to another and manage it in an an alternate location to where it was created. Um. We believe that those mechanisms of managing waste are becoming more and more prohibitive, mostly around the cost of petrol and trucking, but also around the need to keep regional communities vibrant and industry based in regional areas.
And so for us, it's about decentralizing waste management and keeping it close to its region rather than dragging it across country for management. We think that's a more viable way to move into a future. Well, Olympia, thanks for joining us and good luck to you. Thank you so much for having me. It has been fun. So that's our on the ground or in the ground perspective. Now let's go Agnesca do SUSA in London. Aggie, thanks for joining us. When you researched and reported bugs are coming
soon to your dinner table? What really struck you? So? While researching from my article, what I didn't expect to find is how many people there were committed to insect farming, particularly here in Europe. I thought this was very Asian oriented industry. You know, there are at least twenty thousand farms in Thailand. Insects are a popular food in that region. So I thought that if if we were to consume insects here in Europe, that would still be imported from Asia.
And what I discovered was that actually people here are more and more committed to rearing insects locally. What I found surprising was to to meet people who who had other jobs in the past, other careers, uh, city dwellers or who would hear about this possibility and that would just completely make make a career change and switch to
insects insect farming. And at the same time it was it was interesting to find people as well who would such as the Sconing family who are traditional farmers and learned about this possibility that they could actually do it in Finland and and we're willing to take that opportunity. What about the financial incentives for the farmers to get into this field or the city folk that you you discussed. Is it becoming a lucrative business or is it is
it already there? It's a slow journey. I think you are. You're seeing people who are committed because they believe in it, but they do acknowledge that right now, it's not going to be a lucrative business straightaway. It's a very young industry, particularly here in Europe or in the West in general. So so you know, because it's quite small, you do not have the economy of scale. The production costs are going to be much higher than what you obtain in Asia.
So so, just to give you example, you know, the price of crickets or cricket flower in Europe and North America can be as much as five times the price of the same product farmed in Asia, in Thailand specifically, So so you have to wait. You have to see more investment in technology. You need to see the economy scale achieved in order to actually bring the production costs down and be able to sell the product at the
appropriate price. So so so that takes time. But I think you know, as as the demand picks up, you know, many of these people hope that they will be able to achieve good profits at the end of it. So let's talk more broadly about this. This is not just farmers shifting from livestock to bugs because say they're having a midlife crisis. What are the economic forces that are
making this a real business proposition. One attractive thing about insects farming is how few resources they use, So you know, insect faring doesn't require as much land that then they're so tiny you can just keep them in you know, you know, a very compact place. You know, they do not require huge water resources. You know, in terms of that, I think that really helps. Then in terms of the feed, you know, you need to be feeding them in order
to to rear them. And if you look had the feed conversion ratio, you know the amount of feed you need to get in order to produce one kilogram of let's say cricket that is five times smaller than what you require for beef. What role does climate change and population growth play A big one, because more and more consumers are aware of the impact traditional livestock traditional meat sector has on the environment. Where aware that rearing cattle
contributes to climate change. It is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. So more and more consumers are trying to adjust their diets. They're more aware environmentally conscious, and they want to through their dietary choices they want to bring about the change. So insects are a good proposition because you know they are not emitting as huge quantities of greenhouse gas guys this as pigs or cows. So so definitely, this is something that many people are watching
when when they reach out for protein. And and another thing is we are more and more aware that you know, the population will continue to increase. We're expecting to reach the population of nine billion by twenty fifty, and we are aware that we're going to have to increase our food supplies by at least fifty by that time. And because our global resources are limited, we are um and and scientists and organizations and and food companies are trying to find the answers, how are we going to do it?
How are we going to find those alternative proteins? And you do have certain options. For example, you have meat alternatives. So you hear about love grown meat or plant based products that resemble meat, that smell like meat or taste like meat. But we but but we know, you know, we are still far from this um mass production of such products, and we know they cost a lot, so so so you know, it makes you think you know, perhaps insects could be that that alternative, given that they're
actually very high in protein. Aggie. In your article, you write about a couple of restaurants in Finland that are serving crickets on their menu, and you also discuss how ground up crickets, for example, can be made into I guess the kind of powder that could be added to foods like sausages, cookies, muffins, tofu and even ice cream. Is this actually happening already in some of the foods in our grocery store or you know, when when is
this supposed to start really hitting the mainstream. So some cricket flower or insect flower is it's a very fast growing segment of the market. Its ground up crickets. They don't taste of much and and they don't look like insects, so it helps consumers to overcome this echy the factor. You know, it's much easier to consume an insect for many people if if the product doesn't look like an insect,
particularly here in the West. So you're seeing more and more products that use that contain the flower, and the most common one these days that you actually already see in supermarkets. Um, maybe more the the niche supermarkets, or the the organic or the vegan focused was or the you know the health that the health stores. You do see energy bars, so you know, so this is aimed at people who work out and you know, people who just meet a snack. Have you tried any any of
these products? Yeah? I did. I did. Actually, they don't taste of insects. It didn't strike me as um as anything different because insect flower accounts for ten percent of the products, so if you actually look at the ingredients, it's not the majority of what you get in the bar. And then you know, I tried licorice that was a finished product. I tried crackers, so you know, once it's ground up, you know, you just you can just consume it like as if it was any any other product.
So I think the appeal here is more nutrition driven rather than taste driven. Aggie, thanks for joining us. Well, thank you. My Pleasure Benchmark will be back next week. Until then, you can find us on the Bloomberg term, Bloomberg dot com, or Bloomberg app, as well as podcast destinations such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. We'd love it if you took the time to rate and review the show so more listeners can find us, and you can find us on Twitter follow me at
scott Landman Dan. You're at Moss on the School ecode our guest Olympia Yargur is at go Tera Underscore CEO, and Aggie Ta Susa is at Aggie Ta SUSA. Benchmark is produced by tofor Foreheads. The head of Bloomberg Podcasts is Francesco Levie. Thanks for listening, See you next time.