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Joanne Nova
A prize-winning science graduate in molecular biology.
In the renewable frenzy of the early 2020s, Ÿnsect raised €600 million to “reinvent the food chain” and pioneer alternative foods that “respect the planet’s boundaries”. Some $200 million of their funding came from hapless taxpayers somewhere. But in record time, seemingly before it began, it has already gone. Bankrupted. And not because people don’t want to eat mealworms (which they don’t) but because there wasn’t much market in making animal feed either. It turns out that farm owners didn’t want to spend two to 10 times as much on “sustainable” cattle fodder. So the company shifted focus to high-end pet food, where besotted owners have money to spare, but that crashed too.
h/t Tom Nelson
How reality crushed Ÿnsect, the French startup that had raised over $600M for insect farming
By Anna Heim, TechCrunch
The company’s demise is hardly a surprise, as Ÿnsect had been embattled for months. Still, there is plenty to unpack about how a startup can go bankrupt despite raising over $600 million, including from Downey Jr’s FootPrint Coalition, taxpayers, and many others.
Ultimately, Ÿnsect failed to fulfill its ambition to “revolutionize the food chain” with insect-based protein. But don’t be too quick to attribute its failure to the ‘ick’ factor that many Westerners feel about bugs. Human food was never its core focus.
It’s only money…
And revenue was the problem. According to publicly available data, 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. By 2023, the company had racked up a net loss of €79.7 million ($94 million).
The vainglorious heady days of climate communism meant some bureaucrats thought it made sense to spend $200 million dollars feeding bugs to cows to try to change rainfall in 2100 AD.
Defenders of the faith will say this bug factory expanded far too fast, and it’s not the bugs that failed but the management. But the factory was plagued with problems from the start – including diseases, parasites, and fat worms that clog the machines.
In the biggest irony, insects need high temperatures to grow fast and the energy costs were killing them:
How the world leader in insects ended up in bankruptcy.
Behind this exciting showcase, the technical difficulties quickly become apparent. By attempting to raise mealworms (Tenebrio molitor), the company ventures into relatively unknown territory. It faces numerous complications: diseases, parasites, overly fatty worms clogging the machines, etc. Furthermore, insects require a high temperature to grow quickly (over 25°C), which leads to high energy costs, exacerbated by rising prices resulting from the war in Ukraine.
This is a dragon that eats its own tail.
The Green revolution kills the green revolution because energy is too expensive. Not to mention that fantasies of weather control attract terrible managers.
This article originally appeared at JoNova and was republished by CFACT.
