Insect products are becoming the new American trend.

Фото: Depositphotos

Company Aspire opened a research and development center covering an area of ​​25 thousand square feet (2 322 square meters), where it is testing the technology for producing insect products. If testing is successful, then the next company farm will already be 10 times larger. Reports about it Fast Company.

Inside the new building in an industrial area near the airport in Austin, Texas, the robot feeds millions of 24 crickets an hour a day.

The use of insects - or, at least, products made from insects - is becoming increasingly popular in the United States. In the past few years, it was possible to buy snacks from crickets, such as protein bars, made from cricket flour or cricket chips. They are sold both in stores and on the Internet.

Food from insects is an alternative to animal or poultry meat. But now it is an expensive pleasure. For example, a 450 gram of cricket flour costs about $ 20. To make it, you need 4200 to 4800 crickets.

Director General Aspire, Mohamed Ashur, believes that the technology they are developing will help create cricket farms and make insect products more affordable and reduce the price by half.

Company Aspire kicked off in 2013 after the founders, as students, won an award Hult and got $ 1 million for the edible insect business plan.

The Austin Research Center uses a robotic module that moves around the farm and distributes the ideal amount of food. Sensors use machine learning and artificial intelligence to monitor how insects eat and when they need more food.

Using analytics, the company was able to modify the crickets' diet to produce a high-quality end product with more protein and less carbohydrate.

The crickets mate and lay eggs in a designated breeding area, and the larvae are then moved to a bin where they grow until harvest. Every aspect of a cricket's life, from hatching to harvesting, is highly automated. The company has seen a tenfold increase in production. Since manual labor on a farm previously accounted for 75% of the cost of goods, the system can reduce the cost of the final product.

Aspire sells cricket flour to other manufacturers, and also launches its own product line under the brand. Aketta. Consumer and retail demand is growing faster than expected initially.

Other companies also use technology for insect farms. Tiny Farms in the Bay Area also uses data analysis and automation for growing crickets and opened an experimental farm in San Leandro, California, in the 2016 year. But while Tiny farms creates modules that can be used on a small scale, Aspire aimed at large farms.

By the middle of 2018, Aspire plans to build an object of 50 thousand square feet (4 645 square meters), gradually increasing the space until it reaches 250 thousand square feet (23 225 square meters) by the end of 2019. An existing 25 farm of thousands of square feet (2 322 square meters) can grow more than 22 millions of crickets per month.

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