Francisca Castellanos (Crick Superfoods)
Francisca sits with a bag of Crick Superfoods
Francisca Castellanos is the founder of Crick Superfoods, an Ecuador-based business that produces tortilla chips from cricket powder.
The inspiration for Crick Superfoods
While studying International Affairs in Mexico, Francisca often worked with the community through her start-up, Inclúyeme y Aprendamos Todos—a venture focused on inclusion for people with hearing and psychological disabilities in the social and labor environment.
Through her work, she discovered that some of the indigenous communities struggled with malnutrition due to a lack of protein in their diets.
“Although the women harvested crickets, they only sold it in the city as a snack but didn’t eat it,” Francisca shared. “After six months of work, we realized that by teaching them that the cricket could be crushed and put as a protein enricher into the tortilla, it changed their nutritional level.”
After moving back to Ecuador, Francisca began to struggle with a need for protein herself.
“I’m lactose intolerant and I love outdoor sports, so when I was hiking and eating a protein bar with whey protein, it bloated me and I couldn’t have a good sports performance,” said Francisca. “I started looking for savory, high-protein products with alternative protein sources but I couldn’t find any. [So] I combined my dietary needs with my previous experience with crickets and launched Crick Superfoods.”
About Crick Superfoods
“When I decided to start in 2019, I met with several professionals and more than 80 percent told me that I was crazy for wanting to create a brand based on crickets,” she shared. “However, I found the perfect team that helped me conceptualize the brand to communicate what I wanted: a sustainable, clean and healthy product.”
At first, Fransisca wanted to produce chocolate cookies with the cricket powder; however, after testing prototypes with 10 focus groups featuring 500 people, they decided to go in a different direction.
“[The cookie] didn’t work for three reasons. Since they were made of chocolate chips, people thought the chips were crickets,” explained Francisca. “Second, the chocolate melted in the packaging, and third, the nutritional content was not what we wanted—high protein and healthy.”
Francisca eventually landed on tortilla chips. To start, many of the consumers in her focus groups associated “crickets” with Mexico, so a Mexican-style snack would help correlate the snack with their vision. Second, Francsica found that the chips would fill a large gap in the high-protein snack market where snacks were primarily sweet.
On March 8, 2020, with a team consisting of a food engineer, an insect producer, and a chef, they launched Crick Superfoods—only to have the pandemic declared a public health emergency eight days later.
“Many people did not want to try or buy the product,” explained Francisca. “I didn’t give up and kept posting. My first client was a fit mom who was seeking natural alternative proteins to be used in her workout since commercial protein powders had whey that hurt her stomach.”
Shortly after connecting with her first customer, Francisca launched a marketing campaign where Crick Superfoods would deliver the chips with homemade guacamole to people’s homes for movie night—since everyone was already stuck home during the pandemic—and little-by-little, her business grew.
Today, Crick Superfoods’ chips can be found in Ecuador's largest supermarkets and is enjoyed by more than 30,000 customers.
Crick Superfoods in the Because Accelerator
The manufacturing of Crick Superfoods’ chips
In the Because Accelerator, Francisca hopes to learn more about launching a new product that Crick Superfoods has designed—a cricket powder for use in cooking or baking.
“For us, the alliances that we can make [and use to learn about] managing sales are very important,” she said. “Likewise, since it is an international cohort, we can learn about the realities faced by other founders, the perspective on edible insects, and even collaborate with each other to give opinions that help solve challenges.”
In five years, Francisca hopes to have launched a social enterprise with products specifically made for children impacted by poverty, such as porridge made with cricket protein. She also plans to expand Crick Superfoods’ reach to countries like Peru, Colombia, Chile, Germany, Denmark, and the United States.
The Because Accelerator is a 16-week virtual training program designed to help entrepreneurs take their innovative products to the next level. Learn more about the Because Accelerator and how it helps entrepreneurs from around the world scale their businesses and create jobs in areas impacted by poverty.