Opportunities 2015: Can consumers be convinced to eat insects?

Can North Americans live without meat? This is the year a bunch of new ventures will try to convince us we can. But it’s less certain whether consumers will embrace what many are offering as a substitute: crickets. At least 25 small companies are selling or preparing to sell cricket-based food products in North America, including Next Millennium Farms, an edible-insect-promoting venture north of Toronto with a “bug bistro” that sells items like honey-mustard-seasoned roasted crickets. The bulk of their sales, though, come from flour made of ground, protein-rich crickets.

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Cricket tasting with the CB editors

Here’s Canadian Business deputy editor David Fielding and Executive Editor Carol Toller taste-testing Next Millennium’s cricket snacks:

More from the Canadian Business Opportunities Guide 2015:

• The appification of agriculture
• Retrofit dumb appliances into smart ones
• Harness “deep learning” artificial intelligence to spot patterns
• Make big money from smaller markets