Introducing Nutribug…
You probably think the only people who eat insects are celebrities during a bushtucker trial – but that’s not the case. Visit Asia, and you’ll discover a buffet of edible insects available everywhere, and surprisingly they have excellent nutritional profiles.
Did you know that over 100 international start-ups have entered the edible insect market in 2015 alone? The European Parliament has passed a new regulation that greenlights edible insects, and sustainable food experts say they are the future protein.
Still, regardless of how healthy these insects are, Westerners are reluctant to give it a go. It will be a long time before we see crickets and mealworms served up in restaurants. However, one British company has a mission to change people’s perceptions of eating bugs, one insect at a time.
Introducing Nutribugs Beanup Butter, made with 100% organic ingredients including crickets – but in flour. High protein cricket powder is the world’s next big superfood, and these exciting new products include it. Food that contains crickets is packed full of protein and other essential vitamins and minerals, including iron, calcium, omega-3, and B12. This food has all the nutrients any health-conscious person would want without having to chew an insect.
Let’s compare our butter to some other high-protein foods. Beanup Butter is made with just 10% cricket powder and delivers more than 24g of protein per 100g. To put that into perspective, that’s more protein than eggs, which provides 13g of protein per 100g.
However, there’s another good reason we should be open to including insects in our diet – sustainability. The crickets used in the butter are farmed in the far east, and compared to other animals bred for meat, they boast high levels of sustainability. For example, crickets have a short ‘rearing’ period and require 1,000 times less food and water than cows.
Healthy, sustainable, and exciting – we can see why edible insects are the latest superfood and about to be the next health craze. The team behind Nutribug says: “Westerners may regularly eat hamburgers, hot dogs, and other heavily processed junk foods without questioning what is in them, yet they reel in disgust about the idea of eating healthy insects. We believe that adding insects as an ingredient to conventional foods will help overcome this problem and bring this new superfood to the mainstream market, when the insect is no longer visible, the perception of the product changes”.