Down On The Fly Farm

Amy Irvin talks flies and restaurants on Out to Lunch from Mansurs On The Boulevard

Here’s a number that I keep coming back to. American restaurants throw away somewhere between 22 and 33 billion pounds of food every year. To put a price tag on it, that’s about $162 billion in food costs that just disappear. That’s before the restaurant makes a single dime.

I’ve been thinking about that number since I started putting today’s show together, because both of my guests have something to say about it — just from very different places.

My first guest is Kristen Smith. She and her husband Tre started a food truck in the middle of a pandemic, and they’ve been figuring out the food business ever since. Kristen runs the operations side — the compliance, the systems, the strategy. She’s not someone who wastes much. Resources or time.

Kristen Smith, Co-Founder of Tre’s Street Kitchen. Tre is the chef, Kristen handles the business side of the business. It’s a formidable one-two punch that’s propeling Tre’s from a food truck to a restaurant and a big-time player in corporate catering.

Kristen was born right here in Baton Rouge, grew up partly in Illinois when her dad’s job took the family north for a stretch, and came back to Louisiana through Teach For America in 2014, working in East Feliciana Parish schools. Her husband Tre was in the kitchen — working as executive chef at Little Village Downtown.

When the pandemic hit, Tre got laid off. Around that same time, family came through with $20,000 to help them take a shot at the thing they’d always talked about. They drove up to Ohio, bought a food truck, and came home and launched Tre’s Street Kitchen in late 2020. Two weeks in, state restrictions changed again and they had to pivot almost immediately. For months they worked out of grocery store parking lots.

Things have changed a lot since then. Tre was actually a guest on this show in 2023 — so much has happened since, we thought it was worth having Kristen come in and bring us up to date. They’ve done concessions at LSU, a Garth Brooks concert, a sauce line that went from their website to airport retail. And they’re now working toward a brick-and-mortar restaurant and grocery distribution by the end of the year.

David Fluker, President of Fluker’s Cricket Farm and Founder of Soldier Fly Technologies. Soldier Flies are at the forefront of sustainable waste treatment. “They’ll eat food that’s been in a bucket in the hot summer sun for two weeks, they don’t care.”

David Fluker grew up in the insect business — his family runs Fluker Farms in Port Allen, which has been supplying live insects to the reptile and research markets for decades. So he’s not someone who needed to be talked into bugs. What he needed was the right idea.

That came from a friend who showed him fish waste being broken down by black soldier flies. The concept stuck with him for years while he kept working. Eventually, with researchers at Texas A&M and a grad student from South Africa, he launched Soldier Fly Technologies in 2015. The company processes organic waste — manure, produce scraps, feed mill byproducts — using black soldier fly larvae that turn all that material into animal feed and agricultural products.

What David learned — and a lot of his competitors didn’t — is that growing insects at scale is really an operations problem as much as a biology problem. So Soldier Fly Technologies built its own breeding systems and production software, and now licenses all of that internationally. He has active projects in Mexico, Panama, El Salvador and California. He also helped start the North American Coalition for Insect Agriculture, which works with regulators as the industry gets sorted out.