dubiaroaches

We will be staying focused on pet food, simply due to the fact that the species we breed is very time consuming and costly. I’m sure American cockroaches are much easier and quicker to produce on a mass scale, but that’s just nasty! 😆

The biggest “horror” story was back when I first started this. I kept the roaches in a spare bedroom in our duplex, and my wife and I slept down the hall. I had a tub get knocked over and we woke up at 6am to 2” long cockroaches crawling on us. There were literally thousands in our bedroom and our hallway. I had 30 days to get them out, and that’s when I moved them to our first building.

There have been several challenges. At one point a couple years ago we had an infestation of German cockroaches. We moved to a completely different city because of it, and we implemented a lot of “pest control” procedures to make sure it never happened again. Having tens of millions of cockroaches actually attracts a lot of other pests, so I’d say that is probably our biggest challenge. Plus just figuring out how to maximize growth and production. We currently have 5 warehouses within about 10 minutes of each other to separate everything out (100,000 sqft total), and within each building we actually setup multiple 1,000sqft airtight rooms. Within those rooms we have racks with 2’x1’x1.5’ tubs that the “colonies” are kept in. It’s a lot of work!

They either laugh, ask me if I’m serious, or are very interested in learning more about it. I used to tell people I did something else for a living, but now I’m proud of it! Lol

So I actually grew up with reptiles. I got my first bearded dragon when I was 7 and when I was 11 a neighbor moved in across the street who I found out actually bred bearded dragons for people who wanted “designer” morphs at the time. I ended up saving some money and bought them from him when he got out of it. I bred bearded dragons until I was about 16/17 and during that time I bought a TON of crickets. I heard about people feeding cockroaches as an alternative so I started buying a bunch of them (at this time they were almost $1 each). I ended up selling my bearded dragons and the roaches. I dropped out of high school at 16 to get a full time internship at an ad agency and I started doing web design, dev, and internet marketing and while working there I started to see trends of people buying those roaches so I bought a bunch of them again. I bought a few websites and started selling them online. The first two years I spent about $50,000 on Facebook ads and started growing the market for them as an alternative to crickets. It just took off. Over the next few years I spent hundreds of thousands on fb ads and did reptile and exotic pet expos to get the brand out. I think what really drove me to do it was the fact that a lot of the places I bought crickets and other insects from over the years had other pests in with them like spiders. I was terrified of them. On top of that I wasn’t a fan of crickets and for some reason the roaches just became this thing I felt like could be big! It has paid off! But there were many times I was close to giving up or going bankrupt. It’s been a rough several years.