In 2013, together colleagues from McGill University, with whom she had formed Aspire Foods, won the Hult Prize of one million U.S. "Shobhita was recently researching in Thailand and tried everything from worms to water beetles," he said.Įven Gabe Mott, who identifies as a vegetarian, has consumed his fair share of basil-flavored palm weevil. Twenty-nine year-old Shobhita Soor of McGill University chose a rather unusual path: feeding and breeding palm weevil larvae, known as Akokono in Ghana. In order to research their business plan, the members of the McGill Hult team have all consumed "kilos" of insects themselves, Ashour said. ![]() The Power Flour product will vary ingredients according to those habits, adjusting production to the breeding cycles and nutritional profile of each culture. The kinds of insects people consume from country to country varies, with the people of Ghana preferring palm weevils and in Botswana, caterpillars. While for Americans the idea of eating bugs remains mostly a novelty, in other areas of the world they are a common form of protein. But farmers have already expressed interest in raising grasshoppers on a mass level, according to Ashour. He noted that the insect is already familiar to the local diet and currently sells at a premium because of a three-month harvesting season and because grasshoppers are typically hand-picked. "We will be starting with grasshoppers," Ashour said. ![]() "So winning this prize is a great step in that direction."Īshour, along with teammates Shobhita Soor, Jesse Pearlstein, Zev Thompson and Gabe Mott, will be immediately working with an advisory board to recruit farmers and workers in Mexico, where a population of roughly 4 million live in slum conditions with widespread malnutrition. "It's a huge deal because we had a very ambitious but highly executable five-year plan in place," said team captain Mohammed Ashour, whose team hails from McGill University in Montreal. A team of MBA students were the recipients of the 2013 Hult Prize earlier this week, providing them with $1 million in seed money to produce an insect-based, protein-rich flour for feeding malnourished populations in other countries.
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