Editor’s note: As part of a collaboration with CREATE-X, an entrepreneurial program teaching students at Georgia Tech how to launch startups, we’re sharing a few videos and guest posts at Atlanta Inno, along with details about what each company in the program does and how it plans to get to the next level.
“In the year 2030 everyone is [going to be] eating insects…” Patrick Pittaluga co-founder and COO of the CREATE-X startup Grubbly Farms said. At least, that’s what Sean Warner, cofounder and CEO, read a few years ago on a clickbait article. Warner was inspired by this statistic to launch a startup and decided to jump right in to the market.
Warner and Pittaluga partnered up, as Georgia Tech students and cousins, and bought 700 black soldier fly grubs and kept them in their laundry room. Their plan was to make “bug burgers” using the grubs.
When a few friends tested their first product, they very quickly figured out that they needed another way to use the grubs. Thus, Grubbly Farms was born – catering to the tastes of chickens rather than people.
Grubbly Farms sells nutritious snacks for chickens called Grubblies. The black soldier flies become Grubblies through a simple process: they are fed pre-consumer food waste from bakeries, breweries and restaurants in the area. The grubs are then dehydrated and packaged as chicken feed.
This process allows the company to be eco-friendly. For every pound of feed, about 10 pounds of food waste are diverted from landfills. So far, they have diverted over 800,000 pounds of food waste.
Warner and Pittaluga were accepted into CREATE-X Startup Launch in 2015. Pittaluga was majoring in business management with a focus on supply chain management, and Warner majored in construction at Georgia Tech.
“CREATE-X gave us the confidence to forgo job offers and pursue Grubbly Farms full time,” said Warner.
The customer discovery process helped them understand what their product would be and how it would resonate with the customer. During their summer in Startup Launch, they interviewed about 400 people varying from large chicken farm owners and individual chicken owners to restaurants and reptile owners. Pittaluga and Warner were able to understand what everyone in their supply chain needed, but most of all they learned what chicken owners were looking for in their feed: better nutrition, sustainability and made in the USA.
Grubbly Farms recently completed a $1.5 million seed round of funding and has sold over 80,000 pounds of feed over the past two years. Their demand is so high they are starting a second round of funding to finish the buildout of their 18,000 square feet facility in south Atlanta. They currently employ five full-time team members and three additional contractors.
Watch the video to learn more about Grubbly Farm’s story and what’s next.
