Trudeau’s $9 million bet on edible crickets runs into trouble

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Aspire Food Group, which cut the ribbon last year on a 150,000-square-foot edible cricket factory in London, Ont., has just laid off two thirds of its workforce and significantly cut back shifts, saying they need to make “some improvements to its manufacturing system.” 

Speaking to the trade publication AgFunderNews, Aspire CEO David Rosenberg said the company “will be running the production line four times a week instead of two shifts a day every day. We’re 150 people down to 50 and we plan on hiring back up in July.”

This is despite very generous grants from the Trudeau government. In June 2022, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada announced a grant of “up to $8.5 million” to build a “commercial facility to produce cricket protein.”

What resulted was a factory billed by Aspire as the “world’s largest cricket production facility.” As per a CBC profile published at its grand opening, the factory was to house four billion crickets at any one time, and churn out 13 million kilograms of edible crickets each year.

Aspire’s signature pitch – and one of the main reasons they attracted federal government attention – is that crickets have a lower environmental footprint than meat or dairy.

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The 2022 Government of Canada statement announcing the $8.5 million grant mentioned this several times. The subsidy would help Aspire produce “high volumes of nutritious food with a low environmental footprint” and “meet global demand for food by using less water, energy and space and emitting significantly less greenhouse gas emissions.”

“Aspire will be at home here as the company re-defines what is possible in the insect protein sector, creating new solutions for sustainable food production,” Liberal MP Arielle Kayabaga said in the statement.

In September 2022, Aspire announced an agreement with the Korean food distributor Lotte Confectionary Co. Ltd. – pitching it as their first deal to sell cricket power for human consumption. However, the deal was only a memorandum of understanding to “formalize their cooperation in the distribution and promotion of crickets as food.”

According to the AgFunderNews story announcing mass layoffs and production slowdowns, the facility was still mainly selling its crickets to pet food manufacturers as of March 2023.

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AgFunderNews also noted that – just a year prior – Aspire had been saying that they would be at 100 per cent capacity by early 2024, and likely had enough orders to handle all the production. “We have significant contractual commitments for the majority of our production and expect 100% will be sold within the year,” then-CEO Mohammed Ashour had told AgFunderNews in March 2023.

Founded by five McGill University students, Aspire grew out of a proposal that in 2013 won the $1 million Hult Prize, an award for student entrepreneurship run by the Clinton Global Initiative.

The team, led by Ontario man Ashour, had pitched Hult on a plan to solve world hunger through factories producing cheap protein made from insects. The initial idea was to have miniature cricket farms contained within shipping containers that could be moved into developing countries to produce protein-rich flour.

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IN OTHER NEWS

Employment Minister Randy Boissonnault is already in all kinds of hot water for allegedly running a company, Global Health Imports, that received large federal contracts at the same time that Boissannault was serving in cabinet. When texts emerged showing a “Randy” conferring with GHI management about the contracts, Boissannault weirdly claimed that an “other Randy” was to blame. That other Randy has never materialized. What also hasn’t materialized is any of the Indigenous people that Boissannault listed as running the company. The National Post revealed last week that Global Health Imports bid on two federal contracts while claiming to be an “Aboriginal owned” company. The moniker is a reference to Boissannault himself, who has occasionally claimed Cree or Métis lineage. But Boissannault would say on Friday that his only Indigenous identity is that he was adopted into a family that claimed Métis ancestry.

As Donald Trump assembles his cabinet in advance of his January inauguration, one theme that’s emerging is that the new administration doesn’t like the incumbent Canadian government all that much. Trump’s “Border Czar” is Tom Homan, who in February was saying that the Canada/U.S. border is even more of a conduit for illegal crossings by suspected terrorists than the U.S./Mexico border. In an interview with True North Centre’s Harrison Faulkner, Homan also gave his concise opinion of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, “you need to find a better man.”

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