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Ÿnsect, a French insect farming startup, has been been placed into liquidation
- 7492632928 9mo ago[flagged]
- xvxvx 9mo ago'Ÿnsect focused on producing insect protein for animal feed and pet food' Surely nothing could go wrong feeding herbivorous animals a diet of insect protein...
- mikestew 9mo agoEspecially when you could have just fed them the grain directly: …factory-scale insect production typically ends up relying on cereal by-products that are already usable as animal feed — meaning insect protein just adds an expensive extra step. For animal feed, the math simply wasn’t working.
- odie5533 9mo agoThey fooled investors with the sustainability angle. What a huge waste of money on a terrible idea cloaked in lies about sustainability.
- benregenspan 9mo agoIt seems like their pet food business (where they were competing with input-intensive meat products) could genuinely have been sustainable, if they hadn't taken so much time to figure out that competing on livestock feed is hopeless.
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- ErroneousBosh 9mo agoThis sounds like "draff", or distillery mash, where you get a huge lorryload of spent grain from brewing for very little money, which is still pretty damn nutritious for cows and sheep. Better than letting it sit and rot, emitting massive amounts of methane in the process.
- Alex2037 9mo agoplant protein is vastly inferior to animal protein. they don't feed livestock fishmeal for the hell of it.
- guywithahat 9mo agoI mean most pets are carnivores or omnivores, it sounds to me like they just scaled up before they had really found product-market fit
- conception 9mo agoFrom the article looks like fish feed.
- aitchnyu 9mo agoWe have food waste -> black soldier fly larva -> chicken and fish feed companies, a financially sustainable ecosystem of companies globally.
- thayne 9mo agoNot all agricultural animals are herbivores. Pigs and chickens are both omnivores. Also insects are probably good feed for some species of farmed fish.
- geon 9mo agoCows and horses are opportunistic omnivores.
- Fnoord 9mo agoThe quote you make doesn't mention herbivores. Cat food contains insect protein, and cats are carnivores. They even catch and eat insects themselves. In contrast, cats are being fed grains which they wouldn't naturally eat. Moreover, insects are a cheap source of animal protein.
- yxhuvud 9mo agoThey are currently fed fish protein. I fail to see a difference.
- frogcommander 9mo ago[flagged]
- DC-3 9mo agoNot the heckin doggos :((
- jstummbillig 9mo agoWhy would that be? Killing and having them eat chicken and lamb is morally superior how?
- iancmceachern 9mo agoAsk my dog, he knows
- nkrisc 9mo ago…because most dogs just will eat bugs on their own, no outside influence necessary? I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make.
- ErroneousBosh 9mo agoI am baffled as to why cat food is labelled up as having "The great all-natural taste of beef and lamb that your cat loves!" because if my cat could naturally eat beef then that would be fucking terrifying, a 4kg cat that can eat a 600kg cow. They should say "The great all-natural taste of mice and wasps that your cat loves!" based on observed behaviour.
- knowitnone3 9mo agoyou eat beef and you're only 73kg and eating a 600kg cow! Baffling!
- tredre3 9mo agoThanks to tools, I'm a far more capable hunter than my cat. It's trivial for a human of any size to kill a slow moving cow. It's very hard to imagine any scenario where a domestic cat would be capable of hurting a cow, let alone kill and eat it.
- dmos62 9mo ago>The fact that Ÿnsect failed doesn’t mean the entire insect farming sector is doomed. Competitor Innovafeed is reportedly holding up better, in part because it started with a smaller production site and is ramping up incrementally. >For Prof. Haslam, Ÿnsect exemplifies a broader European problem. “Ÿnsect is a case study in Europe’s scaling gap. We fund moonshots. We underfund factories. We celebrate pilots. We abandon industrialization. See Northvolt [a struggling Swedish battery maker], Volocopter [a German air taxi startup], and Lilium [a failed German flying taxi company],” he said.
- polytely 9mo agoI think in the case of flying taxi's is just that it is a moronic idea tho.
- jstummbillig 9mo agoWhat is moronic about the idea?
- i80and 9mo agoIt's hard to pick just one reason, but off the top of my head: * Any failure tends to turn flying things into unguided missiles * Noise is extremely hard to control -- I did an FAA helicopter discovery lesson, and oof * Cities tend to have difficult to manage wind currents and hit-or-miss visibility. I was in a skyscraper across from one hit by a helicopter trying and failing to land in 2019 -- there's reasons for city no-fly zones * Limited landing sites makes them highly situational in the first place, unless you want your streets to be helipads, which you don't These are all fairly intrinsic and not mitigable. I can think of more issues more in the sticks, but you get the idea.
- tyre 9mo agoThe wind in NYC is no joke. In brooklyn yesterday there were gusts so strong that car alarms were going off. In some apartment buildings, the handicap-accessible automatic doors simply cannot open into the wind. Imagine being in a flying car. Nope nope nope!
- zerofor_conduct 9mo agoYnsect-crushing reality - nobody really wants to eat bugs
- dieselgate 9mo ago“Human food was never the focus” I eagerly purchase insect/grub kibble for my dog - both fly and cricket based. Also a lot of vegetarian kibble, I am a vegetarian myself.
- aguacaterojo 9mo agoBut still your dog doesn't really want to eat the bugs, it's just there's no bowl of steak next to it
- regularfry 9mo agoHave you met dogs?
- andrewflnr 9mo agoWe had a dog who would pull watermelon rinds out of the compost pile to eat. We gave her nice bones, but it's not enough. Nothing is enough. All is food and food is all.
- xvilka 9mo agoHow mighty wolves have fallen...
- AngryData 9mo agoHow can you know that? Dogs were domesticated on being fed scraps to start with and came from wolves which are also natural scavengers and eat all sorts of nasty (to us) things. Ive seen many dogs happily gobble up insects, even stink bugs. Dogs don't even know what their food is made out of 95% of the time these days so im not sure anybody can claim they simply don't like eating insect food without some kind of study to back it up.
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- petcat 9mo ago> bankrupt despite raising over $600 million, including from Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition, taxpayers, and many others. How on earth did French taxpayers get roped into funding a moonshot startup whose entire goal was to make pet food out of insects..
- fluorinerocket 9mo ago[flagged]
- kpil 9mo agoGood question. There seems to be strong lobbying for insects as human food, in particular from companies that would be happy feed us with their own shit as long as it's cheap and they could get away with it The green-left seems to enjoy that idea. Exactly why is hard to tell - especially on HN, but let's say I don't think it's rational. So I guess, successful lobbying?
- ekianjo 9mo ago> The green-left You don't need left there, there is no green right
- tsimionescu 9mo agoNo, but there is a non-green left. And the greens do get most of their policy influence by associating with the rest of the left, since there are very few green parties that govern directly, or at least alone. So it's fair to say that such initiatives are successful because a subset of the broader left, the green-left, likes the idea.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- yxhuvud 9mo agoThe why is not that hard to understand - insects provide a lot of proteins compared to how much food they consume over their lifetime. But yes, the obvious place to start is to use it for feeding chickens and not humans. Why chickens? Because insects are part of their natural diet when they are free. There is just a bunch of infrastructure problems that need to be solved for that to work as insects have pretty different problems to solve compared to other parts of the food production chain.
- lloydatkinson 9mo ago[flagged]
- raybb 9mo agoThere's an rule in the EU that says you can't feed the insects pork and then let those insects go on to be fed to pigs (same for beef and chicken). This is intended to prevent the transmission of diseases like Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (like "mad cow disease"). As I understand it, this rule isn't because we have shown it's dangerous to do the pig -> insect -> pig chain but rather because we haven't shown that it's safe. Arnold van Huis and his team at Wageningen University are putting quite some energy researching the safety and lobbying the EU to change the rules based on the findings. At one of the talks those folks they said it's basically a black box of trying to get what kind of science the regulators will consider acceptable. As you might guess, making sure the food waste you feed the insects doesn't have _any_ animal proteins in it is quite logistically challenging and so afaik nobody is doing that at a large scale. I did quite a bit of research into the history of insects in the food system, especially in the Netherlands. While I was rooting for Ynsect and other big players to figure something good out I believe that it's a problem much better suited to a smaller scale (perhaps on the city level). Basically, have the food waste from various stores brought to a facility to be fed to insects and then let those insects be turned into whatever (pet food, fish food, trendy protein bars).
- regularfry 9mo agoYou'd have thought it wouldn't be the proteins in the input, but the prions in the output they would care about. They're remarkably resilient, it's not unreasonable to be cautious.
- clickety_clack 9mo agoAgreed, this is one area where care should be taken. The effects of CJD are absolutely horrendous, and it’s easy to imagine that this might be a way to transmit it.
- anon84873628 9mo agoOr at least focus on not having neural tissue in the input. That wouldn't rely come from consumer waste, would it?
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 9mo agoOh my god eat some beans. Eat some tofu, eat some black-eyed peas, eat some green peas, eat some lentils, eat some northern beans, eat some lima beans, eat some chickpeas
- jansan 9mo agoThis is one of the posts on HN where I first read the dead comments. And they did not disappoint.
- lloydatkinson 9mo agoYou will eat ze bugs
- ThinkBeat 9mo ago> But don’t be too quick to attribute its failure to the “ick” factor that many > Westerners feel about bugs. I think this is a weird wording. I dont think you need to limit the ick factor to "Westerners" There are an awful lot of people out there who would feel the "ick" factor. And even for some of those who do eat insects, they are specific insects, form specific places, prepared in traditional ways. Not a powder of insects
- Hoasi 9mo ago> I think this is a weird wording. I dont think you need to limit the ick factor to "Westerners" There are an awful lot of people out there who would feel the "ick" factor. Of course, this has nothing to do with “Westerners.” No one in their right mind would want farm animals to be fed insect powder. The fact that the company was allowed to operate and to receive massive funding is the real issue here.
- its-summertime 9mo ago> No one in their right mind would want farm animals to be fed insect powder. Why?
- ErroneousBosh 9mo agoThere aren't really any farm animals that eat insects. Mostly they eat tough grasses and plants, the kind of things that we can't eat.
- 317070 9mo agoWell, chickens tend to live off insects when you let them roam. I don't really see how insect powder would be worse than the flour they get now. You don't even need to turn the bugs into a powder.
- fc417fc802 9mo agoIndeed we already feed them insects and we don't powder them. You can purchase bags of dried meal worms at the feed store. The carcasses are fully intact.
- davidw 9mo agoI'm letting my mind wander and thinking what a French insect wrangler looks like. I'm kind of imagining a mix between French style, a cowboy hat, and lab gear.
- chihuahua 9mo agoOr maybe a guy with a large incredibly smelly cheese who is trailed by a huge cloud of flies.
- iancmceachern 9mo agoThis is like Juicero. It doesn't need a startup, investors or "tech". They already do this all over the world, and not just for animal feed... It's not that it's not a good idea, it's already there. It's that it's not a VC idea. And it seems the market prooved my point
- oofbey 9mo agoWhy do you think it’s not a VC idea? VC is necessary to scale up to large volume. It’s easy for me to believe that insect protein can be a good business at high volume but not low. At volume you can get economies of scale and efficiency and get your cost basis down, making things profitable that wouldn’t be profitable at lower volume. Makes sense on fundamentals without a lot of details. Sounds like they were just too ambitious and chased after a very large market with very thin margins. (Animal feed.) instead of a smaller market with thicker margins (pet food) The fact that they were simultaneously pursuing animal, pet, and human product lines is just poor management. Exactly the kind of poor management that VC can encourage, mind you. Because VC pumps in tons of money and wants to see big plans.
- iancmceachern 9mo agoFor the same reason corn farming isn't. They already do this, at scale, feeding people, all over the world. There is no "unlock" to invent some tech that makes it magically more efficient, cheaper, or otherwise more adoptable. The only difference between them and their existing, already on the market competition is they don't owe investors 10x returns.
- oofbey 9mo agoGood point there isn’t some magic unlock. Although maybe they were hoping to find one. But a key difference with corn is that corn has been farmed for thousands of years. We know without a doubt there aren’t any low hanging fruit to make it more efficient. I think it’s a reasonable bet that insect farming might have some easy wins simply because (almost) nobody has tried it at scale before.
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- boguscoder 9mo agoGiven that EU tech salaries are a lot more tame, it would be interesting to see how 600m were even used. Hopefully there’s some good R&D there and not some French alps retreats and Porches for founders
- MarcelOlsz 9mo agoThey had 600 million employees!?
- wiether 9mo ago> how a startup can go bankrupt despite raising over $600 million
- well_ackshually 9mo agoYes. All of Europe was working for them, and we're now entirely jobless. The industries, governments, all refocused on insects, and now it's gone. We don't know what to do. Send help.
- MemesAndBooze 9mo agoThat's very good news. I hope all companies of this kind meet the same fate.
- nQQKTz7dm27oZ 9mo ago[dead]
- woodpanel 9mo agoRest assured though that they will be back. And as always their blood of life against the public's natural disgust will be lobbying, powered by being rooted in elitist thinking.
- WhereIsTheTruth 9mo agoAnimals served us well when human's life expectancy was 30yo Centenarians i know are all on a plant based diet Insects? why bother
- tsimionescu 9mo agoThere has never been a period where most humans would die at ~30. While life expectancy at birth was ~30 for the whole history of humanity up until the mid 20th century, this doesn't in any way mean that average people died in their 30s. Instead, life expectancy was highly bi-modal: most people died as children (most before age 1, but still a large number before age ~15), and most of those that didn't die as children lived into their mid to late 50s.
- its-summertime 9mo agoI'd imagine they would be possibly able to self-regulate easier compared to plants
- max_ 9mo ago"Ÿnsect’s revenue from its main entity peaked at €17.8 million in 2021 (approximately $21 million) — a figure reportedly inflated by internal transfers between subsidiaries. " if you raise that much money and go under, its usually just fraud.
- lefra 9mo agoThe french government has been heavily subsidizing private R&D (up to 50% of the cost, including engineer salaries). It was relatively easy to create a moonshot project worth a few millions, and have the taxpayer pay for half of it. Then you just need to find a sucker to pay for the other half, and collect the money (getting an actual result is optional). How do I know? My company is a minority partner in one such project (wind energy, we would provide instrumentation). It's infuriating, the head company has been trying to make one of the big energy providers pay for half the R&D, with no success, and the project will be closed. Lots of taxpayer money wasted for no result, and we won't make sales. Because of these abuses, the french government is changing the financing rules. They will only finance small proof of concepts first, then a pilot project, and only then industrialisation issues (instead of financing all in one go).
- arnejenssen 9mo agoSimilar like grass fed beef and dairy is a sign of quality and "naturality". I look forward to the day when insect fed chicken becomes a sign of quality. Because insects are part of a natural diet for chickens.
- pif 9mo agoIf the insects are fed "naturally", though!
- Gibbon1 9mo agoReminds me there are startups looking at vat grown protein using hydrogen and CO2 to feed nitrogen fixing bacteria. An interesting thing is solar farms are maybe 30-50 times more efficient than corn. So the above isn't insane on the face of it.
- throwawayffffas 9mo agoIf the insects are fed naturally, it would probably be more cost effective to feed the chickens whatever you are feeding the insects. The only reason to introduce the insects would be if you were using something the chicken cannot eat, like wood.
- amunozo 9mo agoSame with humans. It's much more efficient to feed humans directly than animals for human consumption.
- LunaSea 9mo agoLiving organisms don't metabolise and transform matter in the same way. A chicken eating an insect who ate a plant could produce higher quality feed and thus chicken than if the chicken ate the plant directly.
- m3047 9mo ago> Because insects are part of a natural diet for chickens. It's actually a welfare issue for chickens. They have feathers, and they molt. Just like hair, feathers need methionine. Methionine is very hard to get solely from plant sources. If they don't get enough methionine they eat each other's feathers, not just the discarded feathers (which left on their own they do normally).
- fleroviumna 9mo ago[dead]
- dostick 9mo agoNo Flea Soup for You!
- Hoasi 9mo ago“Make something people want” was supposed to be the motto.
- jimnotgym 9mo ago> Ÿnsect, a French insect farming startup, has been been placed into liquidation Yum, liquidised insects
- yujzgzc 9mo agoMeanwhile the "other" French insect farming startup seems to be doing fine (Innovafeed)
- DonHopkins 9mo agoThey should stick to snails.
- woodpanel 9mo agoGood riddance. Like the beyond meat implosion that was foreseeable from the far, it is another elitist dystopian dream getting smashed by the harsh reality of people's natural instincts. These initiative's will be back though. Likely armed with their lessons learned, like making the government compulse us into eating it. Sugar coat it by telling us it's only once per week, or how affordable it is since we increased the prices of proper food through red tape and taxes.
- CWIZO 9mo agoGood. We do not need to bring even more animal suffering into this world. Especially when we have much better alternatives available to us.
- tossandthrow 9mo agoThe monster in Paris should not fear getting meat packed anymore!
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- adamwong246 9mo agoI find it remarkable, and depressing, that so many people just cannot handle the idea of insect protein. You get similar resistance to water reclamation from sewage and nuclear power. How are we supposed to change the world when we always hamstrung by all the mercurial and irrational whining?
- mos87 9mo ago[flagged]
- jlarocco 9mo agoIMO it doesn't make any sense for a startup company like this to get $600 million in funding before making a profit. It seems obvious that it could be proved out for a lot less before scaling up.
- MagicMoonlight 9mo agoUntil the vegans make it mandatory through legislation, nobody is going to eat bugs.
- pstuart 9mo agoI wonder if they would have succeeded if they didn't try to go so big so fast. Another thing would have been if they had worked with Black Soldier Flies and focused on sourcing feedstock for them and scaling in a cheaper manner -- cheap/modular bins that leverage their tendency to "self harvest" -- the BSF larvae will climb up a ramp when ready and drop right into a collection bucket. Automating the care and feeding of those pods in a cost-conscious manner and then being able to package that facility at scale at the feedstock source, e.g., parking shipping containers at a dairy farm where they're happy to consume the livestock waste. Then collect and bring back to a central processing facility.