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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML Ÿnsect, a French insect farming startup, has been been placed into liquidation
Hoasi wrote 2 min ago:
âMake something people wantâ was supposed to be the motto.
dostick wrote 24 min ago:
No Flea Soup for You!
arnejenssen wrote 49 min ago:
Similar 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 wrote 24 min ago:
If the insects are fed "naturally", though!
Gibbon1 wrote 12 min ago:
Reminds 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.
max_ wrote 54 min ago:
"Ÿnsectâs revenue from its main entity peaked at â¬17.8 million in
2021 (approximately $21 million) â a figure reportedly inflated by
internal transfers between subsidiaries. "
if you raise that much money and go under, its usually just fraud.
WhereIsTheTruth wrote 1 hour 16 min ago:
Animals served us well when human's life expectancy was 30yo
Centenarians i know are all on a plant based diet
Insects? why bother
MemesAndBooze wrote 1 hour 42 min ago:
That's very good news. I hope all companies of this kind meet the same
fate.
boguscoder wrote 2 hours 8 min ago:
Given that EU tech salaries are a lot more tame, it would be
interesting to see how 600m were even used. Hopefully thereâs some
good R&D there and not some French alps retreats and Porches for
founders
MarcelOlsz wrote 2 hours 1 min ago:
They had 600 million employees!?
wiether wrote 34 min ago:
> how a startup can go bankrupt despite raising over $600 million
iancmceachern wrote 3 hours 58 min ago:
This 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 wrote 2 hours 48 min ago:
Why do you think itâs not a VC idea? VC is necessary to scale up to
large volume. Itâs 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 wouldnât 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.
davidw wrote 7 hours 45 min ago:
I'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 wrote 5 hours 7 min ago:
Or maybe a guy with a large incredibly smelly cheese who is trailed
by a huge cloud of flies.
ThinkBeat wrote 7 hours 53 min ago:
> But donât be too quick to attribute its failure to the âickâ
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
jansan wrote 8 hours 18 min ago:
This is one of the posts on HN where I first read the dead comments.
And they did not disappoint.
lloydatkinson wrote 5 hours 34 min ago:
You will eat ze bugs
01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote 8 hours 41 min ago:
Oh 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
edm0nd wrote 2 hours 40 min ago:
no thanks
Alex2037 wrote 6 hours 21 min ago:
No.
tokai wrote 8 hours 29 min ago:
What does that have to do with animal feed?
raybb wrote 8 hours 58 min ago:
There'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).
algo_trader wrote 26 min ago:
> food waste from various stores brought to a facility to be fed to
insects
a. how does that solve the transmission problem?
b. amazing work by EU bureaucrats to regulate businesses that dont
exist yet
c. they can export the feed to fish farms or china or whatever. the
question is do the economics work. US soy bean is just incredibly
productive (and subsidized)
conductr wrote 1 hour 53 min ago:
Is pig > insect > cow (and reverse) any safer or have same concerns?
pif wrote 28 min ago:
As far as I understand, it is indeed safer, because different
animals tend to be sensitive to different illnesses.
themafia wrote 6 hours 31 min ago:
Our city just had a compost program. Throwing away compostable
material into the provided bin was free. They put it into the city
managed compost yards and then every weekend you could go down there
and pick up bags of the finished product to use at home in your
garden.
It's also the case that many states already have a "garbage feeding"
program that allows food waste to be diverted into feed for
commercial animal lots. The food has to meet certain criteria and be
fully cooked and ready for human consumption before being discarded.
jacquesm wrote 7 hours 9 min ago:
Better safe than sorry.
regularfry wrote 8 hours 13 min ago:
You'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 wrote 7 hours 27 min ago:
Agreed, this is one area where care should be taken. The effects of
CJD are absolutely horrendous, and itâs easy to imagine that this
might be a way to transmit it.
petcat wrote 9 hours 55 min ago:
> bankrupt despite raising over $600 million, including from Downey
Jr.âs 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..
wiether wrote 27 min ago:
Figures are all over the place, but the figures around public funding
are around 50 millions (Euros) total, including EU, national and
local.
They were clearly surfing on pure hype: green, local...
max_ wrote 56 min ago:
In Europe ist mostly crony capitalism.
Well connected people using government funds to finance their
businesses.
monero-xmr wrote 1 hour 48 min ago:
French taxpayers need to revolt, and soon. Their situation is
extremely bad
saagarjha wrote 6 hours 17 min ago:
Because pet food is a large contributor to greenhouse gas emissions?
kpil wrote 7 hours 12 min ago:
Good 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?
yxhuvud wrote 42 min ago:
The 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.
ekianjo wrote 2 hours 6 min ago:
> The green-left
You don't need left there, there is no green right
zerofor_conduct wrote 10 hours 23 min ago:
Ynsect-crushing reality - nobody really wants to eat bugs
zerofor_conduct wrote 6 hours 25 min ago:
And here are some of the reasons why:
1. high risk of severe allergic reactions and cross-reactivity
2. contamination with pathogens, toxins, and heavy metals
3. digestive and nutritional drawbacks, including anti-nutrients (no
pun intended) and imbalances
4. and last but not least, the good old precautionary principle:
limited research on long-term human health impacts and emerging
hazards
if you still want to eat zee bugz, consider yourself warned !
petepete wrote 7 hours 5 min ago:
Yet most people over a certain age probably have without realising.
Haribo, Tropicana, lots of fruit juices, sweets and dairy products
used Cochineal.
Fnoord wrote 8 hours 39 min ago:
Why not? Have you tried? I have, must've been almost 30 years ago
now, at Wageningen University. They taste quite well, if well
prepared (they were). Insect burgers are also nice. I liked Damhert's
insect burger [1]. People just think too much it looks like [2] [1]
HTML [1]: https://www.jumbo.com/producten/damhert-nutrition-insecta-gr...
HTML [2]: https://www.theburningplatform.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/0...
tyre wrote 9 hours 24 min ago:
I would happily eat cricket protein if it were more scalably
environmentally sustainable. Iâm fine with milk, but cows arenât
helping our greenhouse sitchu.
Not to mention the issues with pea protein and lead content.
oofbey wrote 2 hours 47 min ago:
What are the problems with pea protein and lead?
Retric wrote 10 hours 17 min ago:
People do however both keep pets and eat animals that eat insects,
which is what the company was aiming for.
dieselgate wrote 10 hours 18 min ago:
âHuman food was never the focusâ
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 wrote 8 hours 33 min ago:
But still your dog doesn't really want to eat the bugs, it's just
there's no bowl of steak next to it
regularfry wrote 8 hours 11 min ago:
Have you met dogs?
andrewflnr wrote 3 hours 54 min ago:
We 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.
dmos62 wrote 10 hours 24 min ago:
>The fact that Ÿnsect failed doesnât 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.
âŸnsect is a case study in Europeâs 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],â he said.
greatgib wrote 1 hour 23 min ago:
For the moment ynsect was launched in France it was obvious that it
was doomed to fail. Like often here, the only real goal was to suck
public funding.
Normally, you would start a small business/factory and scale with
your business. Especially growing insect doesn't require a "mega
factory".
But here, from the onset, they started from scratch and announced a
mega investment to build a giant factory. Obviously getting hundreds
of millions or even a billion, most from public funding as we could
guess.
monero-xmr wrote 1 hour 50 min ago:
Itâs moronic to have the government pick winners. Only private
investors with actual skin in the game will pick those with true
potential. This error happens again and again and again
ajsnigrutin wrote 4 hours 5 min ago:
No monorail on the list?
How about funding some housing for the people? Why is it that every
city had new huge neighbourhoods built en-masse until the 1990s, and
then suddenly stopped (with a few tiny exceptions)?
But hey, flying taxis, right?
Fnoord wrote 8 hours 37 min ago:
Startups failed, now here's bob with the weather.
polytely wrote 10 hours 15 min ago:
I think in the case of flying taxi's is just that it is a moronic
idea tho.
conductr wrote 1 hour 43 min ago:
Agree. It doesnât have the futuristic vibe but an urban gondola
type system is probably what would be best. Especially in a city
where there may already be a network of structures to leverage (eg.
The buildings/rooftops and elevators). It would require massive
coordination or eminent domain type laws to force but end result
could be pretty awesome
jstummbillig wrote 9 hours 49 min ago:
What is moronic about the idea?
i80and wrote 9 hours 37 min ago:
It'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.
signatoremo wrote 2 hours 27 min ago:
There are about 80,000 non-essential helicopter flights in
Manhattan annually -[0]. That means a) there is a lot of
demand, and b) itâs been pretty safe, with accidents being
very rare.
Many people are against helicopters on the grounds of noise,
safety and pollution. Electric taxis will be welcomed once they
are certified and economical. They only need to do better than
helicopters.
[0] -
HTML [1]: https://stopthechopnynj.org/frequently-asked-questions...
jstummbillig wrote 9 hours 15 min ago:
I am (usually) not willing to assume that the founders of
highly technical startups would not consider something that I
as an outsider would in the first 5 minutes of engaging with
the topic.
That makes me skeptical of all of these (minus the wind
currents in cities, that might have taken a little longer).
i80and wrote 7 hours 27 min ago:
If a startup were able to truly solve the first two issues
alone, they would not be burning those world-changing
engineering solutions on flying taxis.
I don't know if a silent, fail-safe, and efficient method of
flight is physically impossible or not, but I do know this is
low on the list of applications it would be first seen in.
EDIT: I'm looking at the air taxi companies this thread
started with, and no, they have not solved any of the
relevant problems.
sverhagen wrote 8 hours 49 min ago:
Founders can be chasing a dream and in doing so mesmerize
investors. Or they capitalize on that same dream being the
investor's. Even if it's not viable, it can still be really
fun company to work for and/or earn money at. Even if there
is a small lane for that sort of flying machine, the sheer
number of companies purportedly working on something like
that is suspect. Given the huge costs for development and
certification, and the small number of vehicles that will
really get deployed (certainly for the first so many years),
there must be many that are never going to make their money
back. I worked for a drone-adjacent company and now my
LinkedIn is swamped with these startups.
RodgerTheGreat wrote 9 hours 7 min ago:
Theranos was famously founded on pitches about blood testing
from finger pricks that literally any phlebotomist and many
people with a modest life science background could've told
you were physically and statistically impossible on their
face. You should be considerably less credulous toward
startup grifters.
jstummbillig wrote 8 hours 45 min ago:
The reason why you (and everyone else) knows about Theranos
is that it was unique, which serves as a bad signifier if
you want to judge what is likely to happen with the next
startup. Being in prison and losing billions of dollars is
just not something most people get excited about.
cbzbc wrote 8 hours 33 min ago:
The reason we know about Theranos is that it ended up in
court. Plenty of other startups have had obviously
impractical ideas that didn't go anywhere.
pastel8739 wrote 9 hours 22 min ago:
One more reason is that it cannot actually solve the traffic
problem that it claims to solve. It might be able to solve it
for rich people when they are the only ones that can afford to
travel by air, but if the cost ever comes down low enough for
the masses to afford it, I donât see any reason that
congestion wouldnât be as bad or worse than it is now. And to
me itâs not a good investment to improve things just for rich
people.
leoc wrote 8 hours 13 min ago:
Thereâs just a lot more space when you can move in three
dimensions, so I donât think the congestion limitations of
non-flying cars are likely to be replicated. IIUC (Iâm no
expert) thatâs one of the most attractive features of
flying VTOL vehicles.
pastel8739 wrote 5 hours 0 min ago:
I honestly think the most attractive features of VTOL
vehicles are that they are from sci fi, and you can look up
and see a bunch of empty space and wish you were there
while sitting in traffic.
i80and wrote 7 hours 36 min ago:
You're bandwidth-limited on a sparse serialized landing
site map no matter what, and you need far higher distance
margins that will eat up basically all of the dimensional
advantages.
If ground vehicles side-swipe, it's just an insurance
claim. If flying vehicles sideswipe, it's a Problem(tm).
tyre wrote 9 hours 27 min ago:
The 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!
xnx wrote 10 hours 7 min ago:
Flying taxis make a lot of sense for very specific areas (e.g.
Manhattan) and applications (e.g. mountain rescue).
rpcope1 wrote 6 hours 44 min ago:
> any kind of outdoor rescue
You know we have these things called "helicopters", right?
signatoremo wrote 3 hours 14 min ago:
We also had carriages before cars. Whatâs the deal of so many
âX already exists therefore any replacement is pointlessâ
posts?
calmbonsai wrote 34 min ago:
At least with respect to aviation, we don't have any
non-combustion power-trains that can remotely come close to
the power-to-weight ratios of turbine engines.
The earliest cars were replacing the animal muscle power of
carriages--a trivially easy feat given that the most
primitive steam and combustion engines easily 10x both the
raw power, power-to-weight, and power-density of a team of
horses.
stoneforger wrote 2 hours 9 min ago:
Because the need is fulfilled adequately. They are not
solving anything new or revolutionising anything old, these
are dumb ideas for dumb people to throw money at hoping it
sticks.
ta20240528 wrote 1 hour 41 min ago:
Is it?
Are we Ââ as a species â really going to spend until
eternity grovelling around on the ground?
If not, then we need personal aircraft.
nandomrumber wrote 1 hour 22 min ago:
What is there to do not-on-the-ground?
Other than wait to be on the ground again?
andrepd wrote 7 hours 47 min ago:
> Flying taxis make a lot of sense for very specific areas (e.g.
Manhattan)
The things people will do to not build bike paths.
jfengel wrote 5 hours 38 min ago:
Unfortunately Manhattan doesn't seem like a great place for
bikes. The weather is just too variable. Some daredevils will
be out in any weather but for most people it's just not
feasible about half of the days of the year.
Not that helicopters make any more sense. The city needs some
car bans, and yes, bicycles are part of replacing that. But
only mass transit will be able to move enough people when
there's a foot of slush on the ground.
medstrom wrote 5 hours 19 min ago:
...ChatGPT? Such an odd take, to point at weather being
variable.
This is a coastal city at a fairly run-of-the-mill latitude,
people build functional bike networks in much worse.
calmbonsai wrote 26 min ago:
I'll point you to my prior comment re:bike-commuting in
D.C. versus the same in Boulder, Colorado. [1] There needs
to be an entire wholesale change in both infrastructure and
culture to make bike-commuting workable in most extant
cities.
Relatively speaking, the infrastructure is the easy part.
I think we'll get to the heat death of the universe before
bike-commuting in Houston, Texas would ever be "a thing".
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46367940
notatoad wrote 8 hours 31 min ago:
i don't think mountain rescue is asking for a better vehicle.
traditional helicopters work.
flying taxi startups, drone companies, jetpack companies, and all
the other fantastical flying startyps keep trying to say they
have applications in mountain rescue, but i'm pretty sure that's
providing a lot more benefit to the flying taxi startup's pitch
deck than it is to any mountain rescue operation.
calmbonsai wrote 39 min ago:
Traditional helicopters also have the effective lift-weight
ratios to tackle the density*altitude of mountain rescue that
these "air-taxis" have _zero_ hope to achieve with the the
vastly lower power-weight of electrical drive-trains and their
lift-inefficient multi-rotor designs.
tyre wrote 9 hours 31 min ago:
Ainât no way you want flying taxis in Manhattan. If two collide
or one fails, you could kill dozens of people.
Maaaaybe instead of the tunnels and bridges, to increase
throughput during rush hours, but even then weâre trying to
have fewer vehicles in Manhattan, not more.
Also, I cannot imagine what it would be like to go through an
intersection during the winter. You would be hit with a wall of
cross-cutting wind tunneling down 50 blocks that no airborne
device is going to handle well. Absolute nightmare.
xnx wrote 8 hours 48 min ago:
Right. This wouldn't be point to point on the Manhattan grid,
but from Manhattan Island back and forth to the airports.
edoceo wrote 8 hours 13 min ago:
Helicopter. Already exists.
s1artibartfast wrote 4 hours 7 min ago:
Well yeah, it would be like a cheap helicopter you can
rent. What is so bad about that.
MadnessASAP wrote 2 hours 43 min ago:
"Cheap" and "Helicopter"
That's where the problem is.
aetherson wrote 2 hours 0 min ago:
It's certainly not crazy to imagine that you could cut
the costs of a helicopter-like aircraft that was
purpose-made for relatively short, relatively
low-speed, relatively light load duties.
rkomorn wrote 1 hour 54 min ago:
The energy cost during operations is very relevant,
too, which is why you see things like tilt rotor
designs with wings/bodies to generate lift.
When Airbus was doing the math on these a few years
ago, the pilot cost was also one of the main
concerns, so it was "autonomous or bust", and they
ended up investing a lot on the autonomous side (not
just the aircraft but also urban traffic management,
etc).
exsomet wrote 9 hours 37 min ago:
Iâm not an expert by any means, but one of the major
impediments I would imagine to flying taxis carrying people is
safety; thereâs a _lot_ that has to be done before people board
an airplane in terms of checks, paperwork, planning, etc.
The dream of âorder a flying taxi on your phone and it takes
you wherever you want in five minutesâ isnât really
compatible with aviation safety culture (at least at the pilot
level in the US). Thatâs not to say it canât be done, but you
probably need a lot of really good PR people to figure out how to
say âwe want to remove the safety controls from this so we can
make money with itâ and have people buy it.
metalman wrote 8 hours 8 min ago:
aviation occupies a great deal of my attention, and there is a
logic to everything that is done, based on actual provable,
repeatable results.
anything involved in high volume passenger aviation has to
pass reliability tests that will dry your eyes out just reading
through the synopsis, nothing is making it to the PR stage.
I splain little bit, pick some fancy country full of rich
people flying around, tell them that the US has just ripped the
lid off airspace restrictions (again¹), and is now letting
some kind of ubber drone thing loose , and quite litteraly
instantly there will be calls for all flights going to the US
to turn around as all insurance policys for commercial flights
to the US will be null and void.
¹one of the few times the US has been forced to back down
admit fault, and agree to changes.
HTML [1]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/12/17/...
aziaziazi wrote 9 hours 48 min ago:
What attribute should they have to make them more suited than
helicopters? Silence ? Energy efficiency ? No landing pad ?
xnx wrote 9 hours 28 min ago:
Lower noise, lower operating cost, lower purchase price, easier
to pilot, more reliable (fewer parts), safer (redundancy), no
emissions, faster time to air, configurable to requirements,
etc.
rpcope1 wrote 6 hours 41 min ago:
Yes, I too want my space alien anti-gravity flying saucer.
Those eggheads need to hurry it up.
ph4rsikal wrote 10 hours 4 min ago:
China calls it the low-altitude economy, and besides human
transportation there is a lot that can be done. Personally, I
believe that propeller-driven devices are too dangerous and
noisy, but there might be innovations coming out of China that
Europe can't
bethekidyouwant wrote 9 hours 5 min ago:
Everything that flies is driven with a loud dangerous spinning
thing (propeller)
nandomrumber wrote 1 hour 24 min ago:
Birds.
ericd wrote 10 hours 12 min ago:
Because noise?
xvxvx wrote 4 days 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...
yxhuvud wrote 35 min ago:
They are currently fed fish protein. I fail to see a difference.
Fnoord wrote 8 hours 47 min ago:
The 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.
thayne wrote 9 hours 24 min ago:
Not all agricultural animals are herbivores. Pigs and chickens are
both omnivores. Also insects are probably good feed for some species
of farmed fish.
geon wrote 7 hours 2 min ago:
Cows and horses are opportunistic omnivores.
conception wrote 10 hours 23 min ago:
From the article looks like fish feed.
guywithahat wrote 10 hours 24 min ago:
I mean most pets are carnivores or omnivores, it sounds to me like
they just scaled up before they had really found product-market fit
mikestew wrote 10 hours 43 min ago:
Especially when you could have just fed them the grain directly:
â¦factory-scale insect production typically ends up relying on
cereal by-products that are already usable as animal feed â meaning
insect protein just adds an expensive extra step. For animal feed,
the math simply wasnât working.
Alex2037 wrote 9 hours 36 min ago:
plant protein is vastly inferior to animal protein. they don't feed
livestock fishmeal for the hell of it.
ErroneousBosh wrote 10 hours 14 min ago:
This 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.
odie5533 wrote 10 hours 41 min ago:
They fooled investors with the sustainability angle. What a huge
waste of money on a terrible idea cloaked in lies about
sustainability.
benregenspan wrote 10 hours 27 min ago:
It 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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