Healthy crunch: Mexico's trio adds grasshoppers to menu for environment-friendly food

A trio of young entrepreneurs has come up with the idea of adding a unique, and slightly weird, ingredient to their food startup's menu to bring in the flavour of healthy and environment-friendly food.

Labelled 'Chapi', the food company has added grasshoppers to their menu with the aim of promoting healthy food, as the insects are known to have high nutritional value, easy cultivation and processing. The demand for the insect has increased in the last few years with an increase in the use in various recipes and food products.

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The founders have also claimed that their carbon footprint is way less than others as 100 grams of grasshopper meat generate almost 14 times less carbon footprint in comparison to 100 grams of beef.

Their company's name stands for food items made out of 'Chapulin', which is a Nahuatl word for a grasshopper and has been a popular addition to the Mexican cuisine for long.

The trio originally planned to stick to small-scale markets, but had to quickly expand to the online world of sales and deliveries as the pandemic took over the world.

"That blow of only having two weeks to move fast, to find out how we were going to work and how to make deliveries, payments, was a little confusing," said co-founder Alfredo Diaz Cano. 

Chapi now takes orders and sells products through social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, and also through various local food delivery apps.