2023 Insect Industry Survey results, part 3

Here is the third and final post reflecting the results of the 1st global insect industry survey that we ran during March-June 2023 with over 120 respondents across the globe.

At Manna Insect we surveyed Black Soldier Fly farmers and enthusiast to better understand the issues, opportunities as well as the current insect industry status better.

In the earlier posts we shined some light to the operation size, including data on how much biowaste is commonly used or planned to use, so here's a logic follow-up on that: Do you have to pay for the biowaste, and how much?

107 respondents replied to this question, and out of them 52 said they were getting the biowaste for free. This is really interesting, as we've heard it time and again, that especially in operations situated in Europe, insect farmers actually have to pay to get relevant biowaste for their operation. In some countries the competition for biowaste is really tough, e.g. biogas is becoming big and taking in all the biowaste they can get. Thus, insect farmers have to pay to get relevant substrate for their insects.

28 respondents said that they have to pay for the biowaste, and 6 were actually getting paid to remove someone else's biowaste. 21 respondents were upcycling their own biowaste.

And the price for biowaste varied significantly among those that had to pay for it. Even if many forgot to name the currency they reported the price on, we saw numbers ranging from 25-2000 USD per ton. It is of course impossible to know at this point the quality and composition of the waste, and if the price includes e.g. transportation, but it becomes clear that some farmers are paying a top dollar for their waste, while in other countries farmers get it for free, which makes comparing business cases between countries difficult - perhaps even irrelevant.?

Especially in developing countries there is often biowaste available for free, as long as you transport it on your own expense, but at the same time the chicken feed or fishfeed may also be cheap compared to countries where the biowaste is expensive to acquire.

That said, it is good to remember, that as long as the operation is local, the business case calculations are easy, but whenever you need to take into account transportation costs, possible tolls or other export costs, storing, additional salaries, etc., the business case is much too often lost. Which is actually one of the most important reasons why Manna Insect's solutions are focusing on upcycling local waste to be turned into locally usable animal feed and fertilizer, thus giving a local farmer a greater possibility to make additional income from insects or to at least save in feed and fertilizer costs and make their farm more profitable.

The most commonly used sources for insect rearing information were Google and more generally Internet, with Linkedin also being mentioned often. The next most common sources were research / scientific papers, and YouTube. Surprisingly Facebook Groups were not commonly used, even if many of those have significant numbers of users.

The events that respondents often visited or planned to visit were in wide range from local animal, agriculture, biology, biotech, hydrophonics and insect events, and the most often named individual event was Insects to Feed the World (IFW) conference.

The most interesting companies in the insect industry were Ynsect with 11 mentions, Manna Insect with 10 mentions, Protix with 8, InnovaFeed with 6, and FreezeM with 3 mentions. None of the other industry players gained but 2 or less mentions. From Manna Insect's part, Thank You, we're very glad we've been noticed among the big players!

And finally, by far the most interesting business cases in the insect industry were producing insect protein for animal feed, followed closely by producing feed for fish and aquaculture. The next most interesting business cases were insect protein for petfood, frass (fertilizer), and getting paid to remove someone else's biowaste. Quite far behind were a chance to upcycle local waste for local (own) use (for cost savings), extracting chitin for biomedical use, and pressing bio-oils out of BSF.

Thank You for all respondents, you will be getting the full results to yourself (if you left us your contact details), and we will most likely run a similar insect industry survey again later this year, so remember to join!

All survey results have now been published at Manna Insect Linkedin company page, and will be published soon at https://www.mannainsect.com. For further insect industry news, research, business cases and more, follow the Linkedin page and react to the content actively to make sure the algorithms remember to show you the content!