We recently connected with Sean Warner and have shared our conversation below.
Sean, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?
The concept of Grubbly Farms originally started in my last year at Georgia Tech when I first read an INC magazine article that discussed insect growing and harvesting. After reading this article, I was convinced that we would all be eating bug burgers one day. Over the next few weeks, I continued to joke with my friends about the idea of bug burgers until one friend convinced me to pitch the idea to a small startup accelerator that was being put together by a handful of Georgia Tech students. Before the pitch, I spent a few hours diving into the concept and researching large-scale insect farms and became further fascinated with the concept.
At the time, the commercial insect industry was still in its infancy. We saw the opportunity to become industry leaders and ride a wave of sustainable agriculture, which will need to be adopted to keep up with our growing population. The flies breed well under natural sunlight, but breeding the flies under artificial conditions was the largest challenge at the time – so that is where we decided to start. The goal of breeding flies under artificial conditions was to create a ‘black box’ or self-contained environment that could be placed anywhere in the world and would not be affected by external, environmental conditions. With this, and some convincing from the other Startup Semester students, Patrick, my cousin and now co-founder of Grubbly and I ordered 700 live grubs off of Amazon and set up a makeshift breeding system in our laundry room at our apartment. We started experimenting with different lightbulbs that would mimic natural sunlight and eventually found a combination that encouraged mating– and we received our first clutch of eggs.
We then went through the steps of customer discovery, where we had to find out who the early adopters were going to be, and what they would need in order to incorporate insect protein into their feed/products. We called 25 large scale poultry operations and 25 large scale fish farms and talked about the idea of sustainable, insect-based proteins, and what they would need to see on their end to be interested in the product. All but one farm expressed immense interest in insect-proteins but we quickly ran into a problem = volume. The sheer size of the animal feed industry ($70bn/year in the US) is a barrier of entry for a lot of companies. As an example, a poultry farm said they would be interested if we could find the right price point, and if we could supply them with 50 tons of protein a month to keep up with their operation. The problem was that we were producing maybe a few pounds a month at the time, and the price of growing the grubs was far too high to compete with traditional proteins on the market – all of which are sold in massive bulk at the commodity level.
This is how we found the backyard pet chicken market. It had been a growing trend in the US and most chicken owners were already familiar with insects as foraging food for their pets. A common treat for pet chickens, comparable to milk bones for your dog, were dried mealworms (a different species of insect). The benefit that black soldier fly grubs has over mealworms is the calcium level (50x more) and is hugely beneficial in egg production. We found a marketable benefit, and the pet chicken space allowed us to sell smaller volumes, at a higher price per pound, while we scale our own manufacturing facility.
This was the origin story of Grubbly Farms and how we found our go-to-market strategy.
Sean, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
About me – Ever since I was a child, I have always been an avid nature lover and obsessed with animals. I had a variety of pets growing up, ranging from dogs, lizards, snakes, fish, and even a scorpion. I worked at a vet clinic throughout high school and considered perusing veterinary sciences at UGA, but ultimately decided to go to Georgia Tech. Unlike my co-founder Patrick, who had started two businesses in college and always had the entrepreneurial mindset, I never really considered entrepreneurship until Grubbly Farms. Ultimately, Patrick and I turned down our job offers out of college and decided to pursue this full-time.
When you start a business, many will typically take a skill or knowledge base that you have previously learned and develop a business model and strategy around it. In our case, neither Patrick nor I studied biology, chemistry, or entomology in college, so we dove in headfirst and tried to lean as much as possible around the insect industry and the challenges of scaling a biological manufacturing line. Once we found our go-to-market strategy within the pet chicken space, we also had to educate ourselves and our customer base on poultry health and general animal health. The few skills that college does teach you, and that Georgia Tech excels at, is critical thinking and problem solving – something that is applicable in any industry.
From day one, Patrick and I said that while money is important for any business, the sustainability factor around what we were doing was the key driver in fueling our passion around Grubbly Farms. Our mission is to reduce the impact that pets have on the planet without sacrificing their health through the education and adoption of grub protein. Our vision is to accelerate the world’s transition to a sustainable and healthy agriculture system for all pets, starting with backyard chickens and hoping to expand to other pets in the future.
There are clear health benefits that grubs offer to chickens: it is a natural diet as chicken will naturally forage for insects, grubs are high in calcium that aids in egg production, and the grubs have a variety of micronutrients that are essential for healthy growth in poultry. Grubs offer other health benefits to animals outside of fowl. When looking at traditional pets of dogs and cats, the grubs are seen as hypoallergenic, meaning most dogs or cats have not been exposed to grub protein in the past and therefore have not developed allergies to them. This is beneficial as pet allergies have continued to rise over the year due to low quality ingredients being used in animal and pet feed. Dogs and cats also have a huge impact on the environment, something that most people are not aware of. Did you know that dogs and cats living in the US, eat 25% of the meat consumed in the country each year? In fact, if USA dogs and cats were their own country, they would be ranked 5th in the world in meat consumption. Our goal is to encourage the adoption of grub protein in all animal feed, so that we can reduce their environmental impact and allow us to re-allocate those resources for direct human consumption.
Patrick and I were crazy enough to breed flies in our laundry room after seeing the potential of an industry that we had no knowledge in. This is a risk that a lot of people probably would not have taken.
We want to give people the opportunity to feed their pets food that is not only beneficial to their health, but aids in building a greener planet for future generations. As we have learned more about the problems with our current agricultural system, it’s become abundantly clear to the both of us that the adoption of sustainable grub-protein is an essential need to support the demand that our growing population is putting on this planet.
We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.
We sell all of our products on our website – grubblyfarms.com.
The pros of e-commerce – You can educate your customers by presenting more information on an e-commerce site vs selling through retail. When selling through brick and mortar, you are limited to your packaging, and any shelf toppers or minor advertising space. At least for the pet industry, e-commerce has been growing at a far higher rate YoY when compared to retail.
The cons of e-commerce – Your supply chain can be more difficult when selling individual units direct to the consumer – vs – retail selling bulk items. From a top line revenue growth – you can see higher jumps from retail PO’s vs the steady growth that is typically seen in e-commerce
Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?
The Lean Startup – book Billion Dollar Brand Club – book
How I Built This – book & podcast
Obsessed – book
The Truth about Employee Engagement by Patrick Lencioni – book
Traction by Gino Wickman – book
Venture Deals – book
Do More Faster – book
Contact Info:
- Website: https://grubblyfarms.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/grubblyfarms/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GrubblyFarms/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/grubbly-farms-inc-/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzRYFFdzW1ZArpGas46J4MA
- Other: TikTok – https://www.tiktok.com/@grubblyfarms
Image Credits
Grubbly Farms