We landed at the Chiang Mai airport and a company truck was waiting for us. No more scooter racing like last time. And believe me that was not the only improvement made at our Chiang Mai office!
The following morning we drove straight to the farm to start the 8 days of intensive work. The location of our farm might surprise people. It’s a 600sqm building standing right next to the highway we took to get there. The thing is crickets don’t nature in that sense.
Just as we stepped inside we were blown away! The Cricket Lab looked like a proper cricket farm with a laboratory. We stood there looking in awe at those beautiful blue boxes with the chirping sounds in the background. It was really cool to see the progress that’s been made!
But the important stuff was waiting in the processing room. It was full of bags with our own cricket flour that just had nutritional lab tests done. The results confirmed our estimations. The technology we chose after much deliberation was paying of – high content of well-preserved proteins, and even more vitamin B12 than we expected. You only need 11g of our cricket flour to meet your daily requirements of vitamin B12 which also happens to be the amount of cricket flour in SENS protein bars. It’s like we knew it back then!
But we came to work and there was no time to lose. Daniel joined forces with Nicolas on financial controlling and I started preparing the customer video production. There was the script, scenes, and last touch ups to make everything look cool. As usual the plan to have everything ready before the video shoot failed. It was an intense and long day of shooting we started at 7 and finished at midnight. But in the end I think it was worth it. Take a look for yourself!
The shooting preparations were right on time for interviews with journalists. Bangkok Post, the main international media magazine in Thaiand, Food Navigator, the world’s most important food industry magazine and Handelsblatt, the number one financial magazine in Germany, all wrote about our mission at the Cricket Lab that week.
We spent the last days with Cricket Lab’s investor who came to see the farm for the first time. Fortunately, we had something real to present. The cricket farm and flour processing are running, everything has been tested, and we are starting to focus more and more on improving all processes. The whole industry is still new and growing. Nobody has farmed and processed crickets on such a large scale so far. For us every new box of crickets is an experiment – how much feed is the right amount, what kind of feed, where to put the water, how much light to use, how to get the eggs, how to harvest, every time we do these things we learn and improve.
Our mission was a success. The state of the farm, the video, the journalist, and development of a new strategy all turned out great. We decided to spend Last days in Thailand at the beach to celebrate. It was a monsoon season in Thailand at the time which means super cheap prices, not many tourists, beautiful empty beaches, but also super-fast rain showers and also forbidden swimming because of gigantic waves. We recommend it!
You can try our bars filled with the new cricket flour right here!
