If you don't eat bugs because you haven't been able to find them in convenient snack packs and whole-roasted in savory seasonings, your wait is over.

Crickets farmed by Austin-based Aspire Food Group are scheduled to go on sale at many H-E-B grocery stores beginning next week. The insects will be sold ground up in protein bars and bites with flavors like "nutty chocolate chip," or crispy in mixes of spices like "Texas barbecue" with only the legs and antennae removed.

Either way, the rollout is a big step for Aspire -- and for the nascent edible insect movement overall -- because of the potential to broaden the appeal of bugs as environmentally sustainable sources of protein beyond what currently is a niche U.S. market.

While insects are standard human fare in many countries worldwide, total sales in the United States added up to no more than $25 million annually last year, according to analytics firm Persistence Market Research, a figure that is growing but constitutes a rounding error compared to the estimated $67 billion-plus U.S. market for cattle.

Cricket-based snack foods are "a way to introduce (mainstream U.S. consumers) to the concept of eating insects," said Mohammed Ashour, co-founder and chief executive of Aspire, a five-year-old startup that sells its retail cricket products under the brand-name "Exo."

But "long-term, ideally what we want is to be able to have a mom that goes into (a grocery store) who will actually pick up sausages and burgers made 100 percent from crickets, or cooking oils that are made from reduced cricket fat, or whatever the case is," Ashour said. "There could be a wide array of highly affordable, alternative proteins" available to U.S. consumers eventually.

He and other advocates of insect consumption, a practice technically known as entomophagy, note that crickets are nutritious and can be produced in large quantities with fewer harmful emissions and using much smaller amounts of resources, such as land and water, than can identical weights of beef, pork or chicken. Aspire can harvest about 100,000 pounds of crickets a year -- or 100 million individual crickets -- at peak capacity, from a 25,000-square-foot warehouse a few miles from Austin-Bergstrom International Airport that it has converted into an automated cricket farm and research facility.

Still, the initial reception by H-E-B shoppers to a snack that once had six legs and hopped will be a test of Aspire's ambitions.

The start-up currently sells its products over the internet and at some brick-and-mortar retailers, although mainly outside Texas. San Antonio-based H-E-B is spending about $50,000 to stock an assortment of the snacks in 84 of its stores, predominantly in Austin and Central Texas but also in San Antonio and Houston, marking Aspire's first launch in a big grocer.

The products are priced competitively to similar non-insect fare, with the protein bars and the whole-roasted snack packs retailing for $2.99 each at H-E-B, and the protein bites retailing for $7.99.

"We like to push the envelope at H-E-B (and) we like to take chances," said Yvan Cournoyer, business development manager for the grocery chain. "We're ready to be the first (major) retailer in Texas to really take the plunge and try this innovative and distinctive item."

Various types of bugs, including grasshoppers, mealworms and ants, have previously been sold for human consumption in Austin and many other places nationwide, although mostly in specialty restaurants and small retail shops catering to consumers with specific cultural backgrounds or ethical concerns. There are other efforts in the United States aimed at attracting general consumers -- such as cricket-based Chirps Chips, made by a West Coast startup -- but H-E-B's rollout of Aspire's snacks is considered a regional milestone and a potential boost for the budding industry.

Bugs "are still pretty niche and kind of a novelty" for human fare in the United States, said Kara Nielsen, vice president of trends and marketing at CCD Helmsman, a culinary innovation consultancy in the San Francisco Bay area. "If (Aspire is) going into a lot of stores, that is a lot of exposure. It's a significant step and really encouraging."

Cournoyer said he has been considering stocking a cricket-based offering at H-E-B for the several years after hearing about the nutritional value of the insects at a food show that focused on natural and organic products. H-E-B evaluated several companies, he said, but opted to go with Aspire because it's crickets are locally farmed and because he and others at the grocer were impressed by Aspire's operation and leadership.

"It's local, it's forward-thinking (and) it's sustainable," Cournoyer said. "When you take all those factors together, it's what made us decide to give it a shot and see how it goes."

But even though H-E-B prides itself on being cutting-edge, Cournoyer made clear that the bottom-line for future orders will depend on how fast the initial batches sell. If they're gone in two weeks, "it's a smash hit," he said, but two years would be another matter and the grocer likely wouldn't order again.

Still, he voiced optimism ahead of the initial rollout, calling the products "fantastic" and noting that individual H-E-B stores were given the option of stocking them or not. Many that have chosen to do so are in the Austin area, he said, a market that's "a little more willing to take chances (because) their customer base is a little more open to trying new things."

Ashour, who turns 32 this month, said that's among the reasons Aspire is based in Austin to begin with.

"There's a millennial demographic of people (here) who are open to exploring and tasting and trying different things," he said.

He and his co-founders started the company in 2014 as business school students in Canada, after winning a $1 million challenge in 2013 -- sponsored partly by the Clinton Global Initiative -- to devise a business idea to address world hunger. They opted to set up their cricket operation in Austin because of the city's strong food culture and adventurous consumers and because it has good weather conditions that help hold down utility costs in the temperature-controlled cricket farm, he said.

The crickets that the farm produces are technically known as Acheta domesticus -- the common brown house cricket -- and they're fed a diet of corn-based, organic chicken feed. Aspire uses the brand name "Aketta" for its cricket powder, the key ingredient in its consumer products.

The company, which also farms palm weevil larvae in Ghana for human consumption, has raised between $10 million and $20 million in venture capital, although it declined to reveal the precise figure. Last year it bought Exo, a maker of cricket protein bars, for an undisclosed amount, and it's in the process of raising another round of venture funding that it expects to close this summer, with the aim of building a commercial-scale indoor farm -- possibly in Austin -- capable of producing more than 50 times the amount of crickets as the current operation, which is considered a prototype.

"If everybody in the world ate a Western diet ... we would need essentially two planet earths to feed everybody," Ashour said. So "there's a pretty urgent need for (humans) to shift to protein sources that are a lot more ecologically friendly."

Bob Sechler, Austin American-Statesman (TNS)