McGill University (Canada) students awarded $1-million Hult Prize for plan to transform insects into food

A team of McGill MBA students pitching a plan to transform insects into a viable food source has won a prestigious prize that came with $1-million to help their project along.

The students — Mohammed Ashour, Gabriel Mott, Shobhita Soor, Jesse Pearlstein and Zev Thompson — were announced as winners of the Hult Prize competition on Monday in New York City. The prize, presented by former U.S. president Bill Clinton, is awarded as support for business plans designed to do social good. The competition was held as part of the Clinton Global Initiative’s annual meeting.

The challenge posed to students pursuing the Hult Prize this year was to try to find solutions toward securing food for undernourished communities.

“This is really serious,” Clinton, congratulating the winning team, said. “If I said to somebody 60 days ago I’m going to give this prize this year to someone who wants to process and sell edible insects — to empower rather than devour — they’d have laughed.”

Clinton, a strict vegan, said he might even seek an exemption to taste one of the team’s “lime cricket chips”, the most exotic of a product range that also includes insect-fortified flour that can cut nutritional deficiencies among poor communities.

The team’s business plan includes plans to distribute “micro-livestock” growing kits that will allow slum-dwellers to grow insects in sanitary conditions all-year round, when currently many insects — for example crickets in Mexico — are only available for two or three months in the year.

Over the last six months, a McGill quintet has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, journeyed across three continents and significantly altered its business model in a quest to win the prize.

After being named finalists in March on the basis of their plan to transform cricket farming into a viable food source, the students have had a gruelling half year of travel and research.

The Hult Prize bills itself as a startup accelerator for social good and is dedicated to launching the next wave of entrepreneurs through social businesses. Its goal is to tackle some of the world’s most grave challenges like energy, education, housing and water.

“Right after we made it to the finals, our immediate goal was to raise money so we could travel and actually validate our business model — which was completely hypothetical. Thankfully, McGill’s alumni network was extremely supportive,” group leader Ashour said.

Upon hitting the ground, the quintet realized they needed to radically rethink many of their assumptions.

“For example, one of the things we thought we wanted to do was distribute kits across slums so people could do farming in their homes. It turned out to be a really bad idea,” Ashour said.

During a trip to Thailand to observe slum infrastructure, the team discovered that slums are not conducive to any sort of farming and cannot tolerate the noise of cricket growing. The biggest problem with their original business model however, had to do with the unique societal dynamics of urban slums.

“The main thing we are very aware of is that we can’t impose any sort of value system. A lot of the reasons people end up in slums are because they’ve left rural areas and are trying to adapt to city life. In other words, they’re trying to abandon farming practices. They want a more urban lifestyle and growing their own food just isn’t a part of that,” team member Shobhita Soor explained.

Finally, they observed that although 2.1 billion people worldwide regularly eat insects, many of them do not enjoy the taste of crickets. Palm weevils, for example, are popular in Ghana, while grasshoppers are preferable in Mexico.

Left with no choice but to revamp their business model, they’ll now provide rural and peri-urban farmers — who unlike their city dweller counterparts are very interested in insect farming — with specially designed farming units that allow a wide variety of species to be harvested year round. The McGill team will then purchase the yield back from the farmers, lightly process the insects at specialized hubs, and sell them to local distributors for delivery in the slums.

These plans might be under threat however, by a continuing dispute with Jakub Dzamba, a PhD candidate in architecture at McGill whom the team consulted with before their victory at the regional finals last March. Dzamba alleges that the team won the regional finals basing part of their project on his patented intellectual property. The university suggested a resolution that would see Dzamba treated as a hired consultant and paid $5,332 for the work he did. The team argues that Dzamba’s renderings were hardly used for any judging criteria and disagrees with the number of hours he claims to have worked. Ashour noted that the committee in charge of the Hult Prize is aware of the situation and does not believe it will have any impact on the judges’ final decision.

Talks between the two parties for a resolution have broken down.

The group plans to establish hubs in five different countries on a year-by-year basis.

“In our first year, we’ll be launching in Mexico — which is home to Neza-Chalco-Itza, the world’s largest slum. We’ve already found a distribution partner there and farmers who are ready to go,” Ashour said.

The McGill squad was up against five teams from South Africa, Shanghai, San Francisco, Dubai and London.

Story courtesy of the National Post (Canada)