This month we spoke with the multilingual, octopus-loving Co-Founder of Small Giants, Francesco Majno about why we should be eating insects on the regular!

Can you please introduce yourself and your badass brand?

Hello! I’m Francesco Majno, the co-founder and CMO of Small Giants - the company that makes the weird, wonderful. I'm an Italian guy who loves food, innovation and new ideas but most of all to innovate our food system with new ideas. By the way, this is exactly what we do at Small Giants. At Small Giants, we make insect-based savoury snacks. Our Great Taste Awards winners crackers made with 15% cricket flour are ideal for falling in love with edible insects. Cricket flour brings an umami taste, a protein punch, and a boost of vitamin B12. 

What inspired you to start Small Giants, and how has it evolved since you started?

I have been friends with Edoardo, Small Giants co-founder and CEO, for a long time. After reading the eye-opening report Edible Insects - Future prospects for food and feed security by FAO, we started discussing why we were not eating them ourselves since they are a normal part of people’s diets elsewhere, most notably in East Asia. We started to think about how best to introduce them to Western diets. We came up with the idea of using insect flour to make crackers as high protein snacks. Our first products were launched in March 2019 to test the readiness of the market. We then took all the learnings and fed them into the development of our new brand Small Giants. Here we tell the complete story of our snacks!

So, serious question now, why insects?

Why shouldn't we be eating insects? They are nutrient-dense, rich in complete protein, minerals, vitamins and essential fatty acids. The FAO promotes eating insects because, besides being highly nutritious, they have an extremely low environmental footprint. Farming insects requires only a tiny fraction of all the natural resources needed to produce traditional protein sources. They can be fed on bio waste, they can be farmed vertically and almost everywhere - people can farm them in their kitchens, using food waste such as fruit and vegetable scraps. Around the world, more than 2 billion people welcome insects into their regular diets. 

Against the backdrop of overpopulation, food and land scarcity, and climate change, edible insects are not the silver bullet but they surely could be a part of the solution. Here you can find all the data and some awesome graphs that could help to see the bigger picture!

What impact do you want to create with Small Giants?

We are still a small business that doesn’t own any production sites or warehouses so our energies are mainly concentrated on scaling up. At the moment, our main effort is trying to elevate edible insects from novelty to mainstream. At the same time, sustainability is at the core of our mission and we select only business partners that can prove to have sustainability policies and practices in place. Our current supply chain consists of ingredients sourcing, production, fulfilment service, distribution. For each step, we partner with companies that have taken steps to reduce emissions.

For example, we decided to source our cricket powder from Thailand. Recent studies have shown that the global warming potential of insects farmed in Thailand (and then transported by ship in Europe) is lower than that compared to insects farmed in Europe. This is mostly due to the energy used to keep the farming site at high temperatures. Crickets need high temperatures (ideally 30°C) to live and Thailand’s climate provides the ideal conditions.

Reducing traditional meat and dairy in your diet is the single most impactful way to reduce our carbon footprint as an individual. Crickets are one of the most promising sources of sustainable protein that we have and with our insect-based snacks, we aim to open consumers’ minds to the benefits of edible insects.

We know that crickets are a good source of protein, but what other ways are they a healthy and sustainable option?

Crickets are nutrient-dense, rich in complete protein, minerals, vitamins and essential fatty acids, and have an extremely low environmental footprint. Our bite-size crackers are made with 15% cricket flour and 100% natural ingredients such as wheat flour and extra virgin olive oil. Crickets bring in protein, vitamin B12 and real umami taste, while cereals offer fibre, texture and distinctive crunchiness. Voted 8/10 by The Telegraph and Great Taste Awards winners, they taste amazing. Among savoury snacks, our products have the highest protein content (22%) and are the only ones with the high in vitamin B12 claim and an adequate proportion of each essential amino acid.

Since starting, have you noticed a shift in consumer diets in the West towards these sorts of options?

People are uncomfortable eating insects because they’re not part of our Western diet. The perception of what we consider as a source has always been changing. Tomatoes were once believed to be poisonous and it took many years before they were consumed as food. Sushi, cacao, lobster are just a few other examples of this switch. Today, our acceptance phase has drastically shortened. We want to accelerate this process using cricket powder as an ingredient for everyday snacks that people are already familiar with, such as crackers, crisps and tortilla chips. And once they try the products and think that the taste is just amazing, the most is done and they’re ready to consider cricket flour as a new, healthy ingredient. This is what we constantly hear from all our customers.

So, yes we noticed a strong shift and so many people now are completely open to considering crickets as food.

What have you found to be the biggest challenge when encouraging people to give products made from insects a try?

In the West insects are not considered as traditional food and herein lies the biggest challenge. Giovanni Sogari, a consumer researcher at the University of Parma, stated: “The so-called ‘yuck factor’ makes the thought of eating insects repellent to many Europeans.”  Not seeing any part of the insects really helps people to overcome their taboo towards edible insects.

What are the next steps for Small Giants?

The amazing feedback that we are receiving from both customers and journalists clearly proves that the concept is correct and that this kind of product has a bright future ahead. Our long-term strategy is to introduce a new range each year in order to strengthen our positioning in the savoury snack market. We aim at sparking a movement for an entirely new way of healthy snacking and at introducing insects into our everyday diet. We have closed a second investment round of £400K and these funds will help us to scale up.

What is your favourite cricket-based snack (if you can choose one) and what is the best way to pair it?

My absolute favourite is our Turmeric & Paprika cracker bites and they go perfectly well with black olives tapenade and cherry tomatoes!

What advice would you give to someone trying to make more sustainable food choices?

We stand for a mainly vegetarian diet that does not necessarily exclude all animal-based products. What we really need is to drastically reduce our overconsumption of traditional animal-based foodstuff and to integrate the diet with protein-rich alternatives – plant-based mainly but also new sustainable alternatives such as crickets! Reducing traditional meat and dairy in your diet is the single most impactful way to reduce our carbon footprint as an individual.

We see you’ve learnt Japanese! Are there any more languages you’d love to learn?

I learned Spanish while living in Palma for a few months but I still need to improve my fluency! My Japanese is very rusty, I have not been speaking any for almost a decade now!

We’re all about good finds here, we’d love you to recommend to us three things that you love, or have been inspired by!

1. I love cooking and Ottolenghi’s Flavour has inspired me with so many new recipes.

2. I loved watching My Octopus Teacher documentary available on Netflix and discovering how sensitive and intelligent octopuses are. I won’t ever eat an octopus again!

3. I’m an avid reader and I just devoured Un Uomo by the Italian journalist and author Oriana Fallaci.

Want to know more Founders doing good? Check out our ethical living blog!

Words by Leonie Carver