Worldwide, insect production for food consumption is still at an early and immature stage. What the Flying Food consortium has been established in Kenya and Uganda in 2014-2019 was innovative and challenging; introducing a new product into a new market. As a team we like to share our lessons learned and present our slightly adjusted approach for implementing Flying Food. Main aim is to improve yield and sales of crickets, and thus creating impact on local employment and income generation (SDG 8 and 5), better nutrition (SDG 2) and reduce the environmental footprint of protein production (SDG 13).

The new approach has four main ingredients:

1. Upfront attracting the market demand for crickets to assure the sales;
2. Start with medium cricket farms using 500 crates, to assure hygienic reproduction and continuous, high quality supply of crickets. When these medium farms are producing at full capacity, 100-150 smallholder farmers in the same area are attracted to start cricket production with 20-30 crates each. The medium farm will supply clean eggs to smallholders, who will do upbreeding and sell the adult crickets;
3. Apply insulation of the farm building and make use of additional heating and ventilation system to assure a constant temperature around 30°C day and night. This will reduce cycle times for upbreeding from 12 to 6-8 weeks, thus improving yield with 33-50%;
4. Structural training and practical guidance of farmers – live and virtually. Knowledge transfer is organized on several levels.

Find attached the full report with lessons learned and adjusted approach.
Lessons learned – Flying Food