Finnish Companies Launch Insect Food Products

04.01.2018

Finnish bakery and sweets giant Fazer started selling bread made partially from crickets among first in the world in November. The breads are for now sold at Fazer’s own stores in the capital city region as there is not enough of cricket flour available for nationwide retailing in Finland. One cricket bread will consists of about 70 crickets and they account to about three percent of the bread’s total weight.

Leader, a Finnish protein, supplement, health snack, and sports nutrient company, launched two protein bars and two snack bars partially made of cricket flour in December. The product launch went surprisingly well as the first batch of 500 000 bars was sold away almost instantly. The next batch will be produced in January when the production plant receives more flour and also that batch is already fully pre-ordered. Leader expects that it will meet stores demands by the end of 2018 as there is shortage of raw material.

Food product company Mattila Bros launched vegetable and cricket steaks, meat and cricket sausages, as well as meat and cricket frankfurters to selected stores in December. The company firstly uses foreign imported cricket flour in the products, but aims to switch to Finnish grown crickets as soon as there will availability of Finnish ingredients.

In the end of November, Nordic Insect Economy announced plans to start a cricket farm in an old factory building in Loviisa and the production will be delivered to at least to Mattila Bros. There are also other companies that have started growing crickets for food production.

The use of insects as food products was allowed in Finland in the beginning of November 2017. Insects contain a lot of proteins, fatty acids, calcium, iron, and vitamin B12. (Sources: Kaleva 23.11.2017, Kauppalehti 29.11.2017, & Tekniikka & Talous 30.11.2017)

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