Mohammed Ashour
The first insect Mohammed Ashour ate knowingly was on live television in Canada. He was a guest on a breakfast show and the time came to taste a cricket.
“I had to act super-normal about it, as if it were the millionth cricket I’d had,” he says.
In 2013, he and four fellow McGill University graduate students (Shobhita Soor, Gabriel Mott, Jesse Pearlstein, and Zev Thompson) had won the prestigious, $1 million Hult Prize. The business model they’d devised to tackle ending world hunger was farming edible bugs.
“We hadn’t built the business yet, it was just an idea,” he says, but the grand prize was the reason he had been invited on the talk show. “Five minutes into the conversation, the host asked if I’d like to have a cricket with her. I had to say, ‘Yeah, of course.’ It turned out to taste really good.”
That was a pleasant discovery for Ashour, 30, who grew up outside of Toronto and basically thought eating insects was “gross.” When casting around for ideas to compete for the Hult Prize, a physician friend told him about a patient who regularly ate chocolate-covered ants.
“I couldn’t shake the idea and just to humor myself I looked into it, and it was mind-blowing how nutritional and sustainable they are,” he says, “and there wasn’t a formal supply chain in the world.”
Now there is, with Ashour as CEO of Aspire Food Group, the company his McGill team launched in 2014, becoming a global industry leader of the movement. In Ghana, they commercially farm palm weevil larvae to address food shortages there, and also operate out of a 25,000-square-foot, temperature-controlled cricket farm and processing facility in Austin, Texas.
“Austin is an extraordinary hub with visionary food start-ups,” he says, pointing out that Aspire has 65 full-time employees, mostly scientists and engineers, who have developed a strong understanding of cricket biology. “We collect one billion data points on many aspects of the life of the cricket, second-by-second, on temperature, humidity, water distribution, their happiest, stress-free growing conditions.”
From hatch to harvest takes 28 days. The crickets get triple-filtered water and organic feed as opposed to life in the wild where they are exposed to toxins and predators. Aspire processes 20 million per month and uses a freezing step to kill them. “They go into a state of torpor and effectively die in their sleep,” Ashour says.
The company’s focus is on markets where insects are already consumed, not laboring just yet to convince Americans and Canadians to alter their diets. An estimated two billion people in countries like Mexico, Brazil, and Thailand eat them regularly. Research shows that one billion people worldwide have a protein deficit, and as the population grows, there will be an increasing need for ecologically responsible sources.
Ashour himself has been converted, saying that when he travels he packs snack bags of Aketta, the company’s brand of whole-roasted crickets, which come in flavors like Texas BBQ and Totally Taco. “They’re really, truly delicious and my wife and kids think so too.”
Highlights
2012: Mohammed Ashour learns about the Hult Prize, a global start-up accelerator for solving pressing social challenges; recruits four MBA classmates at McGill University in Montreal, to compete.
2013: McGill team decides to build their business plan around insect consumption; beats Harvard in the final regional round; forms a corporation as the initial shareholders; wins the $1 million Hult Prize at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York City.
2014: Starts palm weevil larvae farming pilot program with the University of Ghana; incorporates Aspire USA; launches pilot cricket farm in Austin, Texas.
2015: More than 400 farmers in Ghana produce palm weevil larvae for family sustenance.
2016: Ashour and Shobhita Soor, Aspire’s chief impact officer, selected for Forbes 30 Under 30 in ‘social entrepreneurs’ category; launch Aketta.com, retailing cricket protein products.
2017: Grow to 65 full-time employees.