VERO BEACH — When Rohan Sadhwani heads back to school at the end of August, he’ll have one of the more unusual “what I did on my summer vacation” tales to tell.
Sadhwani, a rising junior at St. Edward’s School, spent the early part of the summer enrolled in a five-week Exponential Youth Camp (XYC) in Mountain View, CA. He came away from the experience having made great friendships and a potential food sustainability product for impoverished nations – cricket crackers.
Geared toward high school students with an interest in science, business and technology, XYC is one of several programs offered by Singularity University, a Silicon Valley-based educational corporation that seeks to positively impact the world through exponential technologies. Its mission is to create sustainable solutions to “grand global challenges” – education, energy, environment, food, health, poverty, security, water and space.
Sadhwani, the son of Drs. Deepti and Harish Sadhwani, heard about XYC from a patient of his mother who had attended Singularity’s Graduate Studies program and spoke highly of the experience. Although he otherwise had no idea what to expect, Sadhwani was game, and soon learned that the organization has set some fairly lofty goals.
“The purpose of Singularity University is to improve the lives of one billion people in 10 years. That mission is supposed to be carried through by answering these grand global challenges; basic things that the world could use an abundance of,” says Sadhwani. “One of the biggest parts of Singularity is thinking outside of the box. They really encourage innovation and collaboration.”
He says one of its main focuses is how to best apply technological advances. Citing Moore’s Law, that technology is progressing at an exponential rate, he explains, “The price to computing power ratio is continually getting smaller as we progress in time. So you can buy more computing power for the same amount of money. The main idea is to figure out how we can utilize these new up-and-coming technologies to solve these grand global challenges.”
When they arrived, the 14 XYC enrollees were split into several groups; each challenged to create an innovative way of addressing one of those challenges. He was joined by students from New York, Texas, Belgium and Indonesia.
“We decided to make our focus for the project on the global food crisis,” says Sadhwani, noting that all ideas were completely student-driven. “We heard from some of the lectures that as a country’s wealth increases, people start to want more protein for their diet. We were looking for an alternative protein source; something could be cheaply made to feed a lot of people. So, our group was working on crickets as an alternative food source.”
They immersed themselves in the project, keeping 100 live crickets in their room, which he says were a little noisy, but didn’t keep them up at night. Their “roommates” didn’t become fodder for food though; they purchased cricket flour from Canada for their baking.
“That was just for the experience of seeing what it would be like if someone actually had to grow his or her own crickets and make them into a flour or food product,” he says.
“We did a lot of prototypes. Our main product was the crackers that we made. Our first prototype we made tasted horrible. As soon as it came out of the oven we all ate it at the same time and it was horrible. You could taste the bugginess of it. It tasted like this disgusting cracker that looked bad and tasted bad. It was not marketable at all.”
Undeterred, they baked batch after batch, trying a variety of flavors, textures and cooking methods.
“One of the great things with prototyping is you can get instant feedback. We actually tested our prototype out at the farmers market and got some good feedback,” he says. Samples of the final product, which he says came out really well, were also given out at their final live presentation.
“The farmers market was a week before our final prototype, and we still hadn’t perfected it. I think we got the taste right but the texture was still kind of off. Some of them were bakers actually, and they gave us some good tips to improve the texture.”
They had of course told everyone that the product was made using cricket flour. Despite the fact that people in many countries do eat crickets and other insects, he says one of the biggest problems is the cultural barrier.
“At the end of our project we thought if we were to take this forward, we wanted to have a two-part business model,” he explains.
The first part would include baked goods such as brownies and cookies, and would cater to countries less inclined to eat cricket based goods. He says the one batch of brownies they made tasted great; just like regular brownies. Sales of those products would provide capital to reinvest into producing cricket crackers as an inexpensive food alternative for third-world countries.
“The main purpose is to make something sustainable that is actually much more space-efficient. We did a lot of calculations comparing cricket protein to beef. One of the main things is that they take up considerably less space to grow the same amount of protein. Their maintenance is relatively simple, too. Their feed is actually much cheaper and they consume much less water per protein mass. I believe the statistic is that cows actually consume like 100 times more water per protein capita compared to crickets.”
Because of its health benefits – crickets are high in protein, iron, calcium and B-vitamins – several companies in recent years have introduced cricket-based energy bars. But Sadhwani notes theirs is a “pretty novel idea,” adding that nothing has yet been done on a large scale or as a way of providing an inexpensive, healthy food source to impoverished countries.
“It’s going to be a big industry. There’s a growing demand for protein and there’s also a water shortage. It’s not going to be so easy to produce enough protein or food for that matter for the growing world. People just need to eat something.”
Sadhwani said he made some really good friends, and adds, “I think realistically, maybe when we all finish up with our school; we could reconvene and get something going. It’s really a viable idea, and we’ve already done all the legwork for it. The rights to the project and all of our ideas are ours as a group; they’re not the university’s. We still keep in touch, and I think that there’s a good chance we can move forward with it in the future.”
He would like to enroll in the Graduate program when he’s old enough and eventually, “If I become rich and famous one day,” the Executive program.
It’s also something he would recommend to others saying, “It was a great experience.”