smart | entrepreneurs #FuturHighFive He's Got A Cricket to Ride Crik Nutrition’s protein powder powdered by insects


Crik protein powder... made from dried crickets. By Derek Gagnon


Drysdale of Crik Nutrition, amongst all the posts about cats and ‘Which Frozen song are you?’ was the inspiration for his company. “I was sitting on Facebook one morning


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and (writer/entrepreneur) Tim Ferriss posted something about Exo protein bars, and a cricket protein bar they had,” said Alex. “I wanted to try making something with lots of crickets in it, so I figured protein powder, because the crickets come powdered and I use protein powder every day.” Starting Over


Alex had been an employee of CN Rail


for 10 years, and was also working in real estate, but made the decision to walk away from CN and sell his properties (and most of his possessions) and start life as an entrepreneur. “Tere were tons of other companies


making cricket products, but there was nobody making protein powder” said Alex. Repeated Internet searches found


that there wasn’t any competition in the cricket protein powder market, so Alex


ocial media can often be the source of endless distraction from the daily grind of work. But for Alex


began looking into the research and development aspect of starting up the company. He found a company in Vancouver


willing to allow him to test the product first before committing, and Alex spent months working on the formula. “It probably could have went a little


quicker, but I had a strong idea in my head of what I wanted to be as opposed to making something just to get it out there,” said Alex. “I needed it to taste really good, and I wanted cricket to be around 90% of the ingredients, but that’s just not viable with the price of crickets right now so it’s currently around 30%, and it tastes really good, you can’t tell the difference between it and anything else.” Growing the brand


Alex gets his crickets from Next Mil-


lennium Farms in Ontario, and while he has no immediate plans to set up a cricket farm of his own, he notes it is a possibility down the road once Crik Nutrition gains more traction. “We’ll be doing organic lines; there are


different products we can expand into,” said Alex.” “Tere are different flavours of protein, different types of nutrition like the protein bars or trail mixes. Tere are vitamins and minerals that we can extract from the crickets and nobody’s


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Alex Drysdale shows off his new product of protein powder made from crickets.


doing that. Tere’s lots of room to grow, and it’s an exciting time.” Alex plans to get into research and de-


velopment and manufacturing at some point, but first the Crik Nutrition brand must grow. “Right now I need to focus on brand.


You can’t protect ‘cricket protein powder’. Anybody can make that, it’s too broad of a range to patent. What we need to do is focus on building on brand and making sure that we’re the Coca-Cola of crickets. Get that out there and make sure we have a high quality product so we do stay in the lead.”


Home is where the help is Alex has seen a lot of support from or-


ganizations such as Innovate Manitoba, YES! Winnipeg and Futurpreneur. “Tere’s a really good growing com-


munity here, and meeting other start-ups that are going on right now in Manitoba, you can see this place is really booming,” said Alex. “It’s kind of cool to see, I didn’t know this was really here. Tere’s just tons and tons of support. Lots of people giving us advice and pointing us in the right directions when they don’t have to, and it’s been a big, big help that’s going to help us grow a lot faster.”


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