For her feature article published today about the growth of the edible insect business, Carol Toller got to tour Next Millennium Farms, located in Campbellford, Ontario, and North America’s largest producer of edible insects. In the video above you can see how Next Millennium’s growing facilities operate, as well as how the company develops new food concepts using its signature product, high-protein cricket flour.
Inside the Goldin brothers’ Campbellford facility, it’s a stifling 90 degrees Fahrenheit—perfect for crickets, which fare best in warmer temperatures. Fans circulate the balmy air through the 9,000-square-foot space, which looks as if it could be a Home Depot warehouse, with rows and rows of blue plastic tubs sitting open on stacked shelving units. Look closer, and the contents of those bins reveal themselves to be writhing insects. (Cricket fun fact: Though they’re known as jumpers, they don’t typically leap unless they’re disturbed, so escapees are rare.) Goldin’s brother Darren, who manages the farming operations, lists off today’s harvest: 23 bins brimming with a total of half a million little winged things. They’ll soon be euthanized using dry ice—the bugs are quickly frozen to death—and then ground into cricket flour, the product that constitutes the vast majority of Next Millennium’s sales.
READ THE FEATURE: How a new wave of food entrepreneurs hope to persuade us to eat bugs
