Most people would squirm at the idea of living in the same house as a bunch of roaches, but Kevin Wong has turned cohabitating with vermin into a profitable business — the Dubia Dude, which sells and ships Dubia roaches across the country. Dubia roaches, Wong explains, are high in protein, making them a great meal for reptiles, spiders, fish, and even chickens.
In 2019, while working as an assistant manager at T-Mobile, Wong bought two baby bearded dragons, which he aptly named Spyro and Godzilla, and at first, he used crickets to feed them. “Crickets are really annoying to deal with,” he says. “They would jump out and can actually harm the bearded dragons.” But during a vet visit for a deformity in Godzilla’s tail, the vet suggested he try Dubia roaches, a much more nutritious (and less finicky) option for the growing dragons.
“Nobody around here sold them, so eventually I ordered some online,” Wong says. “And my bearded dragons — the two of them — ate through them super quick, and they’re kinda expensive, too, so after that, I started breeding them. Once I had a successful colony and my dragons were at a pretty good age where they didn’t need as much, I reached out to people on Facebook and they were like, ‘Well, I’ll buy some.’”
As one would expect, breeding roaches proved an interesting task. Initially, Wong kept them in his “small, not even walk-in” closet. “I would hear them at night,” he says. “It was creepy, and now I don’t sleep in the same room as them.” Instead, he says, the roaches have taken over the upstairs bedroom and closet in the house he shares with three roommates. “I think right now I’m close to 100,000 [roaches], or between 100,000 to 200,000.”
Though initially focused on curating a local brand, once Wong started his website and promoted his business on social media, the Dubia Dude began shipping nationally, and he quit his T-Mobile job. “I actually got my first [online] order while out of town, so basically my mom ended up packaging up the order and shipping it out, which was really nice of her. She’s helped me a lot.”
In fact, Wong’s mom’s influence has spread into his business practices, as she encouraged him and his siblings to be environmentally conscious and to always recycle. Out of this mindset came the idea to reuse plastic bottles to ship the roaches. “So they’re not loose in the box,” Wong explains. “I based it off of ease of use for the customer so you can take the [mesh] top off the bottle and shake them out.” So far, the Dubia Dude has reused over 7,000 bottles sourced from family and friends.
But Dubia Dude’s green footprint doesn’t end there. “I’m trying to do the whole cycle,” Wong says, so all dead roaches end up in a compost, sometimes his mom’s, sometimes his assistant’s. “We create a lot of fertilizer. I’m trying to create a liquid fertilizer for people to use,” he says. “I know that the roaches [who are fed only organic food] are super high in nutrients. As fertilizer, they’re really good to use.”
As Wong continues to grow his business and delve into other areas of interest, such as real estate, scuba diving, and rock-climbing, he hopes to emulate his father’s work ethic and his mother’s humility, and maybe even acquire a few other reptilian pets for his collection, which has since grown to include two scorpions and a colony of hissing cockroaches.
