Mr Bug

The company was started in 2020 during lockdown by Paul Walton and Conal Cunningham when there was time and enough gin! It has grown from a box in the kitchen to a test site and after successful SEIS funding earlier this year we built a small commercial vertical farm. We are currently the only company in the UK breeding mealworms to be used as protein in pet foods.

Paul Walton runs the farm and ensures the high quality of our stock. In some ways Mealworms are easy to raise and in others it is quite difficult to make large scale production work and the farm requires day to day attention, it is actually like real farming. Paul has become a real pro in his field and communicates regularly with other breeders internationally. Conal Cunningham deals with the marketing, sales and product development and tries to convince the world of the merits of insect protein.

Insect protein is a truly environmentally friendly product. Gram for gram of protein it uses one tenth the amount of land and nearly a quarter the water needed for cattle whilst creating a tenth of the environmental impact, also mealworms are fed on bran, a by-product of wheat production and in addition to creating a highly digestible protein they have a by-product of frass which is an amazing fertiliser which can be used to grow plants creating a truly circular economy. Mealworms are vertically farmed indoors which shields them from extreme weather, they create their own warmth so no heating is necessary and they don't need lighting for growth so minimal power is used in their breeding.

We aim to expand our insect protein range of products to disrupt the existing use of climate damaging meats used to make dog and pets foods. As we grow we intend to use the warmth from mealwom breeding to run heat exchangers potentially to create power potentially making our facilities carbon negative. The public are beginning to understand the full potential of insect protein and once legislation in the UK changes to allow it to be used for human consumtion we will be in a good position to bring insect protein into the human food chain. Meanwhile every time our product is brought into the house this amazing protein is normalised a little more.