Legendary Foods: scaling insect protein in Africa

Biography

Shobhita Soor is the founder of Legendary Foods, a Ghanaian foodtech startup producing protein by harvesting palm larvae. Legendary Foods sells the protein B2C (via its own sauce and cookies) as well as B2B (by providing FMCG manufacturers with a replacement for milk protein). 

Prior to Legendary, Shobhita founded another foodtech startup, Aspire, in the US. 

What did you learn at Aspire that led to Legendary?

At Aspire, we specialized in producing cricket protein, which we sold to pet food manufacturers and the agricultural industry. After a couple of years, I felt the desire to work on something with a more direct, human health impact. 

I’d heard about palm larvae and its nutritional potential, so I started exploring. The first question I needed to answer was whether palm larvae were amenable to being farmed, and thus produced at the scale required to build a business. For example, Africa hosts this wind termite which only comes out when it rains. It’s delicious, there’s a massive market for it, but its living environment is so peculiar it would be hard to farm. 

Palm larvae are traditionally harvested in a destructive way. As their name indicates, the larvae are recuperated from felled palm trees. In some cases, the larvae are taken from already felled trees. In other cases, people intentionally cut down healthy palm trees to collect the larvae, leading to deforestation. 

Aspire taught me a lot on the technical side of producing insect protein. I figured we could farm palm larvae vertically, by recreating their living conditions, without cutting down palm trees. We started with a decentralized model, where local farmers would farm larvae and sell it to us. This proved to be operationally difficult, for quality-assurance and logistical purposes. 

We’ve recentralized our operations. We now have our own vertical farm in Kumasi breeding the larvae. Then came the business model challenge: how are we selling this larvae? 

How did you start out?

We initially focused on selling fresh larvae, as we saw demand for it in the Ashanti and surrounding regions. It turned out to be a taxing model: fresh larvae is a quickly perishable product, so any distribution blunder could be fatal to our produce. It wasn’t sustainable. 

We pivoted to harvesting the larvae and turning it into a protein powder that can be used as a replacement for milk/wheat/fish protein in various manufactured products. This plays a strategic role in the African context as well: a lot of those protein powders are imported, so a local, cheaper, culturally-relevant alternative could be a strong selling point. According to the FDA, domestic fresh milk production represents less than 1% of Ghana’s total dairy market value.

Source: FDA

What are your main products today?

Before we moved into the B2B space, we had to prove that there was consumer demand for larvae protein. To do so, we launched two flagship products: a cookie and a condiment, where what would traditionally be milk protein or fish/shrimp protein was replaced with larvae protein. 

Those two products are then sold to two main channels: open market (roadside sellers) and modern trade (supermarkets, pharmacies, gas stations). Today, consumers can buy our products at Shell gas stations, Melcom supermarkets, AddPharma pharmacies…

We’re moving into B2B now, but B2C sales still makes up the majority of our revenue mix. Even while we grow B2B, B2C will remain a staple: it’s a potent way to maintain a direct relationship with end customers and gauge their needs, identify trends… Our B2C revenue is also a hedge against inevitably long B2B sales cycles. 

Source: Oxford Business Group 

How have you structured your salesforce on that B2C vertical?