Refining An Insect-Enabled Process For Making Animal Food From Low Value Crop Sidestreams

There is a company called Volare based in Finland that has developed a more energy efficient version of an insect-based system for converting various food processing “sidestreams” into food for pets, birds, fish, chickens, and hogs. It represents both a technical and regulatory advance with substantial potential for expansion.

Most crops grown for human food need to go through some sorting and processing steps to get them ready for us to consume directly or to be used as an ingredient in something we like to eat. In the process various unpalatable or inedible “sidestreams” are generated. The food industry has an economic incentive to find uses for these products rather than to simply let them go to waste. In some cases, a different human food can be generated as in the case of turning “cull” apples into juice or sauce. Another option is to capture the energy potential of a sidestream by putting it into an anaerobic digester and generating renewable natural gas. Some sidestreams can be directly fed animals in which case both their energy and nutritional potential is captured.

One very interesting option is to utilize the “super power” of an insect called the Black Soldier Fly (or BSF) to unlock both the nutritional and energy potential in sidestreams even if they wouldn’t otherwise have that much value. Black Soldier Flies may have originally come from the New World, but they have effectively hitchhiked around the world with humans and become “cosmopolitan.” They are harmless to people, but they have a remarkable ability to eat just about anything because they produce at least 17 different digestive enzymes. Their larval stage can thrive on many normally low value sidestreams and then they can be processed to make high quality protein meal and desirable fats. This BSF system is already being used extensively to make pet food, but it is also an excellent option to feed fish, pigs, and chickens. Several significant BSF-based technologies have been featured in this column throughout 2022 as this is rapidly becoming a large scale industry. Even so, there is a great deal of potential for expansion and even competition with the bioenergy use of several sidestreams.

BSF technology is currently more widely used in Europe than in the US, but it is also highly regulated there, particularly if the intention is to use it to make feed for animals intended for human consumption. This constraint is linked to the unfortunate history of Mad Cow Disease or “BSE” that has spurred the strong influence of the precautionary principle in many EU regulations. The currently approved process for making animal feed from BSF larvae involves a substantial addition of water and a good deal of energy to ensure that there is a “kill step” that would not only take care of any pathogenic bacterial contamination, but also destroy any prions of the type that caused Mad Cow.

There is a company called Volare based in Finland that developed and patented a process for making high quality protein and lipid animal feeds from BSF larvae but without a significant addition of water. Because of this their process takes substantially less energy than the existing method and thus a 50% lower operating cost. Volare went through the difficult process of convincing the EU regulators that they could meet their safety standards with the new method.

Volare has an initial plant in Finland which can process hundreds of metric tons/year of sidestreams and produce BSF-based protein and oil. They are planning another facility and hope to be able to process 50 thousand metric tons/year by the end of 2024. They use a variety of feedstocks including oat husks, potato trimmings and distillates from the brewing industry.

Currently they make mostly pet food and a feed for birds, but their EU approval will allow them to expand to the fishmeal market for aquaculture and to chicken and pork operations. There is a good deal of interest globally in using BSF systems for post-consumer food waste, but that would be even more challenging from a regulatory perspective since it would involve meat. Still, Volare sees significant room for expansion because nearly two thirds of the sidestreams across the food system could be worth more as BSF products than they are for biogas production. Also, the facility needed for BSF production has a similar capital cost to the installation of an anaerobic digester, but is easier to operate. Insect-based protein and oils are on track to become more and a more significant part of the animal feed supply, and hopefully this technology will help to accelerate that change.