Despite $8.5 million in taxpayer funding, the world’s largest cricket farm suffers from the “yuck factor,” critic says
Farmers Forum staff
LONDON — The Ontario cricket factory that was built with the help of an $8.5 million federal grant has axed two thirds of its workforce, or about 100 of 150 jobs, according to media reports.
Eco-oriented ‘agritech’ publication AgFunderNews, quoting a company executive, reported in November that Aspire intends to re tool and rehire those employees at the London, Ontario facility in July next year.
The 150,000-square-foot plant is the world’s largest cricket-farming factory. It opened in June 2022 amid considerable fanfare about raising the insect as an efficient and inexpensive protein for both human and animal consumption.
But Dr. Sylvain Charlebois, senior director at Dalhousie University’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab, suggested the troubles point to a more fundamental challenge: “The ‘yuck factor’ associated with eating insects remains a powerful deterrent for many Canadians, making it difficult to see insects as a viable dietary choice,” Charlebois wrote in an op-ed.
Currently, most of the cricket powder produced by Aspire is actually eaten by people, after being exported to South Korea, according to Charlebois. The product’s only domestic use in Canada is as a pet food ingredient.
He suggested that Canadians are unlikely to swap steak for crickets anytime soon as “food is deeply tied to culture and tradition.”
Meanwhile, the latest Aspire headline had the Official Opposition Conservatives chirping at the Trudeau Liberals for supporting the cricket venture.
“Liberals spend $9 million of your money on an edible bug factory. Now we get ‘crickets’ from them about where the money went,” Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre posted on the X social media platform. Poilievre’s party also launched a related online petition, ‘We WON’T eat bugs.’
Five McGill University students formed Aspire in 2013. They launched the firm after the team won the $1 million U.S. Hult Prize that year.
