 Hi everyone, how many of you here today have ever eaten an insect before? This is very impressive I was gonna say I make insect food and for those of you who haven't we have our cricket chips at the SoCAP marketplace If you're curious But a lot of people when they hear what I do they think I'm one of those new age kids Who rides around on a bike? This is my co-founder actually And with a sticker on the back that says arms are for hugging and drinks kombucha and eats kale and then Instagram's it hashtag organic But that's not at all who I was or the path that I was on in fact I'm from Nashville and I grew up on fried chicken and mashed potatoes and gravy And I'm also one of your very traditional overachievers. I had straight A's in school. I went to Harvard I wanted one of those fancy jobs where I knew where my next paycheck was coming from and I could stay at the four seasons if I traveled although the hostel here is pretty nice and That's what I thought I wanted but then Something happened that completely put me on a new course where I actually don't know where my next paycheck is coming from I was in Beijing two years ago, and I was there to eat a fried Oh, that's my overtiefer, but I was there to eat a fried scorpion And the first thought that came into my mind was fear What if it's disgusting? What if I die? I mean, these are very valid fears But I couldn't back down from the dare. So I closed my eyes and put in my mouth and my first thought is this tastes like shrimp and That's really interesting because actually insects and crustacean are very closely related And a week later my co-founder sent me an article about why the world should be eating insects It's actually a UN and FAO report and in there We found that insects are one of the most sustainable protein sources available for example It takes 2,000 gallons of water to make a pound of beef But only one gallon of water to make a pound of crickets But not only that crickets are really healthy So they have twice the protein and half the fat of beef for the same amount of meat and it's a complete animal protein So basically all of this is to say that the world would be a better place if we ate insects So we thought okay, maybe we could try to replicate our Beijing experience here in the US So we went to the local pet shop and bought some crickets mealworms and wax worms and fried them up and tried to feed them to our friends Exactly People were freaked out Which is valid. So we're like, okay, that's fine. Let's try something else So we actually ground up the bugs and so it actually looked like ground meat and we made these mealworm tacos, these are actually ours and We brought it to the Harvard Innovation Lab for our first ever pitch competition and We were the last to go. So we put it in the fridge We made about 50 of these come back two hours later And there were only five left because we forgot to label them and people thought they were beef tacos Which was great because people love the taste of them. We were really excited. We were like, okay Let's give it to the judges. They'll want to eat them. And so we gave it to the judges and they looked at us like what we're not eating mealworms and That was a good lesson for us because even though we ground up the bugs and you couldn't really tell what it was It still wasn't distant enough informed factor And that's how we landed on cricket flour, which is crickets dried and milled into a powder And we decided to put it into people's favorite foods like chips And these are our chips or we call them chirps and we also like the bug puns and We found it really amazing while only 20% of people would try our mealworm tacos almost everyone wanted to try chirps And actually they're a recent study by ETH Zurich and pecking University had the same finding about the psychology of eating insects Which is that people are much more likely to eat or Westerners are much more likely to eat insects when it's put into They're familiar foods. And so we think that our friends really wish that we you know read it before we fed them the whole crickets But that's okay. You live and you learn and so then Something was happening my co-founder and I we were cooking bugs in the kitchen and Every single time we were doing it. We were facing that initial fear of eating insects and nothing bad was happening So we were becoming more and more familiar and comfortable with this idea of eating insects and eventually stopped being scared And in psychology they call this exposure therapy So we really wanted to try to do the same thing But we were at crossroads because People were still not changing right? We were facing our personal fears, but the outside world wasn't and we thought we were gonna lose to theirs But we had an idea that we were really passionate about and we thought that could change foods impact on climate change But it was an idea that people were scared of I mean who does that right like give me money I'm gonna freak you out like that's so weird And then the second thing is that what if this idea was as crazy as it seems I remember the first time that we pitched to an investor This is when we first started and we said, you know We want to make food with insects and he just looked at us and he said well I've been an investor for 10 years and this is the worst idea I've ever heard So, you know, we didn't we didn't really know where to go from there And but it was at this time that one of our advisors told us he was like You know, you can't really give up on something just out of fear of failure. Yes, okay Maybe you are crazy, but there are a lot of other crazy people out there So go find them and ask them what they think so we did we launched a Kickstarter campaign Oh, I just don't know my slides we lost a Kickstarter camp We launched a Kickstarter campaign where we wanted to raise $30,000 and we raised $70,000 over 30 days with over 1,300 backers and That makes us one of the most funded food Kickstarter's ever so we were getting a really positive response but even more than that Yahoo caught wind of our Kickstarter campaign and They published an article about us and it got so much traffic it landed on their front page And at the end they asked would you meet eat chips made with bugs in them? They got the wrong bug, but it's okay And over 13,000 people responded and 51% of people said yes, which is more than people win elections with so we were really happy with that and so from there We thought okay, we can really we can make something of this and so Slowly every day we put one foot out the door waiting for the door to slam But the door just kept opening wider and wider until we really just walked through the door and became what we call full-time bug and towpreneurs and now we're selling online and in stores and What we discovered is that? Really, you know, there's no way that we can control what's happening with The you know what people's fears that they have now But what we can do is think about okay, how can we make a positive change and how can we lead by example and so Every every day You know there's people have fears and I know that I live with fear all the time But I can't I can't I can choose whether or not that fear controls me or if I control that fear and so every single day we get to feed people bugs and You know I get to see their face go from being really scared to them being really curious and then the spark of oh my god I just completely blew my own mind to come over their face And it's this most amazing feeling because just for that second we realized that Anything even eating bugs is possible and so that's really what we're about and so we want everyone to eat bugs spread the buzz bug appetite