alt Hacker NewsŸnsect, a French insect farming startup, has been been placed into liquidation
Comments
> 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
>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.
"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.
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.
Meanwhile the "other" French insect farming startup seems to be doing fine (Innovafeed)
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
Good. We do not need to bring even more animal suffering into this world. Especially when we have much better alternatives available to us.
The monster in Paris should not fear getting meat packed anymore!
Given 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
“Make something people want” was supposed to be the motto.
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.
> Ÿnsect, a French insect farming startup, has been been placed into liquidation
Yum, liquidised insects
No Flea Soup for You!
Ynsect-crushing reality - nobody really wants to eat bugs
This is one of the posts on HN where I first read the dead comments. And they did not disappoint.
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Good 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.
> 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..
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
That's very good news. I hope all companies of this kind meet the same fate.
Animals served us well when human's life expectancy was 30yo
Centenarians i know are all on a plant based diet
Insects? why bother
'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...
I 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?
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).