Federal investment in area company

What does a cricket taste like? Whatever it eats.

That's according to Mohammed Ashour, co-founder and CEO of Aspire Foods, the cricket-processing facility located in southeast London's Innovation Park.

“It tastes exactly like what you feed the crickets,” Ashour said on Monday during an event held to announce that up to $8.5 million of taxpayer money will go toward construction costs and technology — artificial intelligence specifically — that will monitor the billions of crickets about to be turned into food.

In the case of Aspire's crickets, Ashour added, they will be fed a rich plant diet.

The first of the facility's crickets will be incubated in a few days. Once they're at that stage, it will take about a month before they reach maturity, and are ready to be processed.

“What we're attempting to do has never been done before on Earth,” Ashour said. Aspire began nine years ago as a project with four other McGill University students who, in essence, want to solve the problem of world hunger.

In addition to the London buildings, Aspire also has a development facility in Austin, Texas.

“I grew up eating crickets in my porridge as a kid because they bring so much protein,” London West MP Arielle Kayabaga said during the afternoon announcement. Eventually, 13 million kilograms of crickets will be processed annually in London. Francis Drouin, parliamentary secretary to the minister of agriculture and agrifood, was on hand Monday to represent Ottawa.

Drouin described the Aspire plant as the world's largest vertical cricket farm and noted how the insects are one of the “most environmentally friendly protein sources.”

“Thank you for the investment in this project,” Ashour said to Drouin, Kayabaga and London North Centre MP Peter Fragiskatos.

Ashour said he takes seriously the responsibility of being a careful steward of public money.

Some of the byproducts from the Aspire operation processing will be sold back to area farmers as fertilizer, Ashour said.

A large and growing industry, London's food-processing sector benefits from the city's location in one of the nation's richest farm belts and its easy access to Canadian and export markets through Ontario's 400-series highways.

Also a major employer, the industry is home to smaller players and giants such as Labatt, Cargill and Dr. Oetker, a lineup soon to be joined by Maple Leaf Foods Ltd., which is building a $660-million chicken-processing plant expected to employ 1,600 workers.