A maggot farm? For some, it’s a tough sell. But not for Talash Hujibers, who decided to give insect breeding a try when she saw insect protein companies pop up at school across Europe.
Hujibers grew up on a farm near Nairobi. After studying agribusiness in the Netherlands, she came home immersed in a swarm of flies, food waste and fundraisers on a mission to produce enough animal feed to replace soy and fishmeal as both are becoming increasingly unsustainable.
At 25, she employs 64 people and is recruiting investors who want to help her scale.
Hujiber’s company, InsectiPro, isn’t the first to take up and deal with this fly-feed idea, but it wants to be among the few that both scale and make a profit. She expects to repay her $ 1.5 million investment by the end of this year, which would make her a rare hit in a room that’s been hot for several years but is still in the running to be Prove concept.
Although Barclays has estimated that the insect protein space will be worth $ 8 billion globally by 2030, its key players in regions like Europe have blown capital and struggled to produce on a large scale. At least in Africa, InsectiPro’s traction could signal the future of the industry. With its favorable climate, welcoming regulatory environment and urgent demand for new sources of animal feed protein, East Africa is uniquely poised to take the lead.
“Kenya’s climate and organized chaos allow the insects to thrive,” says Hujibers. “While waste management is a bit organized, waste has nowhere to go, so companies like InsectiPro can fill a void in a sustainable, circular way.”
Fly up
Eva driver
Piles of organic waste, ready to become food for the flies.
At first Hujibers thought she was going to try fish farming. But when she found out how expensive the food was, she became curious about alternatives. It caught the wind of the Black Soldier Fly (BSF), whose larvae can be boiled, dried and fed to fish and cattle. “How is this insect so magical?” she remembers thinking.
On paper, at least, the model sounds too good to be true. The flies feed on scraps of old food from local grocers and restaurants. Your eggs (the maggots) are then converted into high-protein animal feed, which is cheaper and often healthier than traditional feeds like fish meal and soy. Some companies also sell maggot droppings as fertilizer.
It’s a win-win-win situation: organic waste is discharged from landfills while smallholders can cut costs while meeting their livestock’s nutritional needs. BSF also requires less water and less farmland than other options. Soybean cultivation has been linked to deforestation and land grabbing, and overfishing has made fishmeal expensive and unsustainable. With global food demand expected to grow 70% by 2050, leading to a protein shortage and a food crisis where East Africa is particularly vulnerable, it sounds like a no-brainer to include BSF in the mix.
Of course, reality is never that simple. Hujibers’ predecessors learned the hard way that despite the pesky ability of flies to survive where we don’t want them, it has proven difficult to raise them on a large scale.
The first big player in the industry, AgriProtein, was founded 10 years ago in South Africa before moving to the UK last year. The company spent more than $ 135 million on research and development trying to figure out how to scale it, and in 2017 announced big plans to partner with construction conglomerate Christof Industries to build 100 new factories around the world. Four years later, the Cape Town flagship is being sold and operations in the UK are currently being managed, some form of bankruptcy, confirmed CEO Jason Drew.
According to Drew, the Cape Town R&D and production test facility “was invaluable as we were developing our large factories,” he explained, “but the site is at the end of its usefulness for the group.” While two new locations in California and the Netherlands have been completed, construction times have been delayed and the other 98 haven’t even started.
Cobus Kotze was a founding member of AgriProtein and worked closely with Drew for almost 10 years. He now runs his own smaller BSF operation near Cape Town. In his view, the African context lends itself to smaller and less technical approaches. Given the low price of feed, paying back massive investments in cutting-edge technologies to control the fly climate and clean up the waste they consume ultimately requires production on a scale that is too unwieldy. Among other things, it becomes difficult to ensure a steady flow of waste.
“There’s a real danger in thinking that the solution is just high-tech, high-tech, and more sophisticated,” says Kotze. “But there is a balance – you have to find the right technology that fits the price of the market in which you are producing.”
That’s why Hujibers and a growing group of Kenyan BSF entrepreneurs are doing things a little differently.
The live larvae, mid-production line. They still need to be dried, boiled and ground into fodder.
A friendly climate
While AgriProtein and big European companies like French company Ynsect and British company Entocyle have raised and spent hundreds of millions of people to create optimal environments for their flies, itchy Kenyan startups have a unique advantage: the flies can thrive in the country’s natural climate .
Instead of exorbitantly making sure their climate is just right, Hujibers only has two air-conditioned rooms and instead relies heavily on heat guns and sprinkler systems. She says while this makes the flies a little less efficient than they could be, the cost savings are well worth it.
Other BSF pioneers in the region include Ecodudu, which was recently funded by Frankfurt-based impact investing fund Greentec Capital Partners, and Victory Farms, the country’s largest tilapia fish producer, which started a BSF pilot project in May 2020 to cost lower on fish feed.
In addition to the favorable climate, the International Center for Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE), founded in 1970, was a main reason for all this enthusiasm in Nairobi. Located just 12 kilometers outside of town, the Rockefeller Foundation has partnered with the Rockefeller Foundation to spread the BSF gospel in the area by providing training and distributing larvae. Most of the local BSF entrepreneurs got their start there, including both Hujibers and Laura Stanford, founder of The BUG Picture; The two shared a greenhouse.
Eva driver
The boiling process. The larvae end up in this vat of hot water, which kills them and boils them before they are ground into food.
“We experimented together and learned from each other’s mistakes which made it less lonely,” says Stanford, whose company is also advocating the leaner approach to the imperfect environment. “And it was cool that it was a different girl because, as we know, the world is full of men in business.”
Indeed, BSF has been a unique catalyst for female entrepreneurship. According to Dr. Chrysantus Tanga, the entomologist who leads the INCIPE training program, 40% of the 11,600 farmers they have trained over the past three years have been women. Since control of land and capital in Kenya is still strongly male, and BSF requires less of both than other types of agriculture, it has been shown to be more accessible.
However, as an entrepreneur, raising capital is notoriously difficult – and even more difficult than it is in Africa – which is why Hujibers began piggybacking on her father’s flower farm, Terrasol.
She is now producing around 2-3 tons of feed per day and still cannot keep up with the demand. And she produces the only local gamer who is not lacking in capital: her MIT-trained competitors at Sanergy are hoping to hit 50 tons of BSF feed per month by the end of May, when she is projected to be closer to 150 point.
This is partly because Sanergy comes into the world of BSF from a slightly different angle: Instead of leftover food, her flies eat human feces. The company’s focus is on tackling urban sanitation by building low-cost toilets in city slums and converting the waste into fertilizer. However, a few years later, they realized that raising BSF would make them more money: animal feed with fertilizer as a by-product.
With cash washed up from a cadre of impact investors like Echoing Green, Ashoka, the Gates Foundation, Novastar, and the Finnish and Dutch governments, they have recently attracted more commercially minded financiers like Axa and Cornerstone. However, much like AgriProtein, they face the high costs and challenges of working from dirtier waste.
“The advantage in Kenya is that the BSF work here is really part of the government’s agenda for the circular economy,” says David Auerbach, CEO of Sanergy. While regulations are still hampering the growth of the industry in many states, Tanga and INCIPE have successfully mandated policy makers to approve the use of insect-based protein in animal feed in Kenya.
The future of fly food
When many in Kenya think about the future of BSF, they look excitedly to Rwanda. With a more organized waste collection system, a warm climate, similarly friendly regulations, and particularly expensive feed, Stanford recently decided to move.
Hujibers looks at their flies.
She hopes that others will use her to take advantage of the industry’s opportunities. “We just need more people to get into BSF,” Stanford emphasizes. “I don’t really have any competition – there is enough organic waste in the world to do this anywhere, and the demand for animal feed is so high that there is room for everyone.”
Tanga is working to create a BSF association to encourage farmers to learn from one another and to facilitate access to the space. He says his research suggests that demand far exceeds the volume currently being produced. More than 80% of farmers are willing to switch from fishmeal and soy to BSF if they have the choice.
Since the sale of AgriProtein’s Cape Town factory appears to mark the company’s departure from the continent, it may be the smaller, nimbler companies in East Africa that are worth watching.
“I don’t know anyone who entered and left this industry – I think you might fall in love with it,” says Stanford. “People get excited when they’re over the whole idea of a maggot.”
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