Selling Live Crickets Online: Early SEO, Influencer Marketing & AI Customer Service with David Fluker

I’m David Fluker, a second-generation insect farmer, which is kind of rare. I grew up in the insect industry, and I’m from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Go Tigers.

As a kid, the only summer camp I had was camp cricket. I started working on the family farm at a very young age. I can trace my Social Security record back to age eleven, so I know I was being paid by then. I took over the family business at nineteen, when I was a junior in college, and started running cricket and fish bait routes, which I’d done every summer anyway.
While dropping crickets off to fishermen and bait stands, I’d see orders coming in from zoos, universities and pet shops while working in the shipping room. I wondered what those were for, and we discovered they were for feeder insects. Fish bait was seasonal and feeder insects were year-round, so we pivoted the company to focus more on feeder insects and started marketing to pet shops, universities and zoos.

It rains a lot where I’m from, and sometimes a rainy weekend left me stuck with a week’s worth of cricket crop, because crickets only live a couple of weeks in the full-grown stage. I didn’t want to waste them, so I’d go out to the lake and dump a million or more crickets to feed the fish, and I’d think, that’s a lot of money. That’s how I came up with the idea to dry the crickets. Fluker’s was maybe the first company to sell a freeze-dried cricket.
Today Fluker’s still does a lot of live feeder insects. We ship out about six thousand orders each week direct to the consumer. But the Fluker brand is about eighty percent of our sales, and that line is heavily focused on dried insects for reptiles, fish and birds.

This is what I want to be my legacy play. Fluker Farms is now mostly run day to day by the third generation, and they’re doing a wonderful job. Soldierfly Technologies is a subsidiary of Fluker Farms. A black soldier fly is a supercomposter. It’s a non-pest fly you can find almost anywhere in the world. It looks like a black wasp, it doesn’t spread pathogens, and it doesn’t bother you. Look them up after you’ve listened to this podcast.
Back in 2005, a friend told me about a buddy a few parishes over, which would be counties for most people, who was composting kitchen food waste with these flies. I went to see it, and I immediately bought the domain Soldierfly.com from GoDaddy. That began a very long journey. If you go to Soldierfly.com, you’ll see what Soldierfly Technologies is today: a greater-good play, a way to take waste streams and bring them back into the food system.

You bring them back in two ways. You compost the waste, which makes fertilizer, and the larvae are sifted and harvested to feed other animals, such as poultry, fish, pigs and dogs. The beauty of soldier flies is that they’re high in protein and fats, and they also have antimicrobial peptides, which is a fancy way of saying they’re functional ingredients that improve an animal’s gut health. If a chicken eats a small amount of them, its gut health improves and it puts on more weight on its regular feed.

Anybody who has a waste stream and wants to dispose of it sustainably and bring it back into the food system. It could be a processing plant that cuts up bagged salad or fruit, or a commissary for a restaurant group. Soldier flies will take basically any waste stream, though you do have to formulate it a little. Once you have it formulated, you dose out several hundred thousand soldier flies, and they compost it in ten days. We harvest the larvae before they pupate into flies. What you end up with looks like a bag of soil from the store, which you can add as fertilizer, plus the fly larvae, which you can feed live or dry.

Typically it’s someone who knows they have a waste stream and is tired of sending it to the dump, or who composts it the normal way, letting microbes eat it for six months. The issue is that while you’re at least bringing fertilizer back into the food system, you release a lot of methane and lose the valuable protein you could recover with soldier flies. They’re basically composters on steroids, done in about ten days, and meant to scale to a very large commercial level.

Flipping to the pet industry, Fluker Farms sells over fifteen thousand bags a week of soldier fly larvae to the backyard chicken market. There are customers everywhere. Some people even compost chicken manure with them.

We’ve really embraced social media. We used to advertise in print. We were in one of the premier magazines focused on reptiles, and we had the back cover and the inside cover. We spent a lot of money on print ads, and you can see the slow erosion of that, so we shifted into social media.
I also spent a lot of time on SEO very early on, in the early days. If you type “live crickets” into Google, we’re probably going to come up just under the paid results in natural search. I’m doing the same thing for Soldierfly Technologies, but the world is a different place, and it takes much longer to build those rankings. I’m working on getting Soldierfly onto the natural search results as well.

On social media, we work with influencers. When I first wanted to move into that sphere, I saw guys with ten million followers and pointed it out to my sales guy, who was basically my right-hand man when I was running Fluker’s. He said, Dave, those are probably not the people you want. They’re shock value, with poisonous snakes and things you shouldn’t be handling. Let’s find somebody who’s a good guy.
That’s when we found Kenan Harkin, Kenan Unleashed. He’s a reptile conservationist and a former BMX biker who used to do all the X Games type things, and he has a reptile sanctuary in Florida. We provide him with lots of Fluker’s goods and some sponsorship, and he uses our products. It’s been a very good relationship. We also work with several other influencers, including in backyard chickens, so we’ve really embraced the whole social media influencer thing.

We are. Fluker’s is using Claude, and Soldierfly Technologies is using Gemini. The reason for the difference is that we’re on two different platforms. Fluker’s is a big ecommerce play, and we actually use AI to answer about a third of our calls. The rest are answered live and direct. If somebody wants to track an order, AI can do that a lot faster than a person giving them a tracking number.

On the Soldierfly side, I was just talking to a gentleman before this call about cameras that do spectral imaging. I can take a slurry of food in a big tank, say a variable food source in a five-hundred-gallon tank, mix it until it’s homogenous, take a small sample, and hit it with a spectral camera. It gives me the macronutrients: the protein, fat, fiber and so on. AI is going to help a company like Soldierfly Technologies a lot, because as we formulate variable waste streams, we’ll be able to use that kind of technology to make it work.
If you look at AI, it’s taking large data sets, using linear regression and parsing them down to the answer. To me, it’s a game changer. It’s a different world, and it’s exciting to see all of this happen.

The way to bring about a greater good, to get it to the world faster, is licensing. I’d like to have a greater good, but I also have to make a profit. It’s not all niceness. We’ve spent years and millions of dollars developing our process, the biology and our breeding system. We have software that tells you what to do with a breeding module: you launch the module, it lasts two months, and you do something to it every week and collect eggs. The software tells you when and how, and those are all things learned over time.

I’m not going to be everywhere. It’s unlikely I’ll set up a place in South America, but I can bring that technology to South America. So our goal is to license our technology.

Well, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.