Our first plan was to do the Kickstarter campaign in March of 2016, but that was just wishful thinking. Why? Creating a recipe for the world’s first true insect-based protein bar from all natural ingredients was much more of a challenge than we could have ever imagined.
Our vision is to change the western diet and another generic bar won’t get us any closer. We wanted our bar to show everyone the direction we are headed, we wanted to create something that has never been done, an insect based bar with:
- 20g of protein
- All natural ingredients only
- Low in carbohydrates
We teamed up with an experienced insect-chef, a food technologist, and a scientists studying insect eating. With this roster, it’s going to be a piece of cake, we thought.
It wasn’t a “piece of cake”, it was the whole cake and more
We knew what flavors we wanted to make but the problem is the bar has to be held together by something and that is not easy to do using only wholesome real food ingredients. Many of our first prototypes were uneven in taste and they would break easily. After a big pile of dead ends, we were out of options, we had to risk it. Yes, we decided to host a public tasting session.
Insect protein bar tasting session – not your typical event
We didn’t know how people would react to eating insects in a bar and were exposing our work to judgment for the first time. We were quite nervous but also excited to find out what they think. In the end, there were no shocked reaction and we actually learned a lot! For example people can be divided into two groups, one likes our pineapple bar the other our chocolate-orange bar. Also people like bigger chunks of nuts us and the cinnamon flavor is like magic, it was much more popular than we expected.
So, after we got feedback regarding the taste, we consulted with experts again, made dozens more samples trying to refine every aspect of the bar, and after about 150 versions, we had our final recipe! It took over half a year but it was worth it. We are proud of our bars.
