Like the prototypical Silicon Valley startup, Oakland-based Tiny Farms is launching in a garage, the brainchild of tech world founders. But instead of working on the next app, the company is trying to build a model for a better cricket farm–the type of industrial-scale facility that could eventually make eating bugs as accessible as chicken.
“We were looking at food production, and ways we could apply what we know about–design, sensing, and data capture–to something that would basically increase the efficiency of our food system,” says Tiny Farms co-founder Daniel Imrie-Situnayake. Their research pointed to insects as a solution for growing sustainability and production challenges.
Then the UN published a report saying that we should all be eating more insects, and bug-filled food startups began to pop up. The only problem: No one really knew how to efficiently produce something like crickets on a massive scale. That’s the challenge that Tiny Farms hopes to solve.
“If you think about where farming was a few hundred years ago, when the majority of production was through subsistence farming, people had very idiosyncratic techniques,” says Imrie-Situnayake. “They didn’t have great equipment, they didn’t have access to science and engineering that could help them do things more productively. That’s basically where insect farming is today.”
Right now, raising a crop of insects takes a lot of human labor; farmers have to feed crickets by hand, for example, instead of being able to use an automatic system.
“We’re using data to optimize the entire process–from breeding insects to feeding them, rearing them, all the way to processing and distributing them,” explains Imrie-Situnayake. “Our models tell us where the bottlenecks are. Then we’re able to use modern techniques like rapid prototyping to build and test solutions.”
By reducing human labor, the startup thinks it will be possible to produce insects at a scale that can begin to replace some meat.