Chirps Buzzes About the Benefits of Bugs in Your Belly

A lot of things seem weird until they become common practice. This is especially true with food. Without any history or context, you wouldn’t necessarily look at a chicken, pig, or shrimp and say, “I want to eat that”. And yet eat we do on a daily basis. When you think about it like that… is it really so weird to eat insects?

Not according to Six Foods, a company that makes high-protein products like Chirps Chips using crickets. The brand, which came to public prominence in 2017 by appearing on Shark Tank and receiving a $100K investment from Mark Cuban, has made it part of its mission to educate people on the many benefits of eating bugs. They include:

• Taste – While the idea of eating a cricket might sound a little funky, it doesn’t mean they can’t taste good. The Chirps website notes that crickets have a “subtle umami or nutty flavor”.
• Nutrition – Chirps highlights the amazing nutritional content of crickets, saying “cricket protein is a complete protein with all nine essential amino acids, more B12 than salmon, and more calcium than milk”.
• Sustainability – This might be the big one. Chirps wants to reduce the impact producing food has on the environment. Compared to livestock, crickets require far less land, food and water to raise and mass produce.

While the idea of eating crickets might sound a little odd to most Americans today, so did the idea of sitting around watching a glowing box for entertainment before we did it every day. Sometimes it just takes one forward-thinking brand to give people a little nudge and normalize a new way of doing things. Could Chirps be that brand when it comes to the commercialization of eating insects?