Fly farmers make new case for insect ingredients in aquafeed
Scale has reduced carbon output by 80%, says Innovafeed in white paper written with Protix
Two European black soldier fly (Hermetia illucens) farmers today published a jointly-written white paper that sets out what they say is a more real-world, up-to-date method of assessing the use and sustainability of insect ingredients in animal and aquafeed.
“Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) provides an essential foundation, but it does not always capture the full impact of ingredient choices within a changing food and feed system,” argue France-based Innovafeed and Dutch company Protix.
“At scale, factors such as competition for raw materials, land-use implications, alternative uses of co-products and functional benefits in animal nutrition can materially influence the overall outcome.”
The white paper, written by Innovafeed’s head of aquaculture product development Marine Bézagu, chief business officer Maye Walraven, and Protix chief technoloy officer Stijn Harms, questions whether industry is measuring the full impact of an ingredient, or only the impacts that are easiest to quantify.
A more dynamic framework
“By combining traditional LCA with a broader assessment of system-level consequences, scalability and in-farm functional benefits, this paper proposes a more dynamic framework for evaluating insect-derived ingredients and their potential contribution to the sustainable growth of animal nutrition.”
The authors point out that many of the existing assessments of the sustainability of insect-derived ingredients rely on out-dated early-stage pilot data and on static comparisons with mature and optimised conventional ingredients.
“Economies of scale, combined with optimised processes and synergetic industrial integration, have already brought the carbon footprint of some industrial-scale black soldier fly protein systems to levels competitive with several conventional protein sources, on a curve that continues to bend downward as output grows,” they write.
Economies of scale, combined with optimised processes and synergetic industrial integration, have already brought the carbon footprint of some industrial-scale black soldier fly protein systems to levels competitive with several conventional protein sources, on a curve that continues to bend downward as output grows
“Meanwhile, many conventional benchmarks have higher emissions, depending on source, production system, and methodology.
“Looking beyond Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) to uncounted consequential carbon costs and in-farm functional benefits, we argue that a dynamic, at-scale assessment offers a more complete, policy-relevant basis for evaluating insect ingredients as one of the solutions to support sustainable growth of animal nutrition.”
The carbon intensity of Innovafeed’s insect-derived protein has fallen by a factor of five since 2022 because of industrial scale-up and synergies with neighbours at its site at Nesle, northern France.
The factory is co-located with starch manufacturer Tereos and the Kogeban biomass plant. This enables Innovafeed to acquire a supply of quality substrate for the insects to feed on and for Tereos to locally valorise its co-products. The co-location with Kogeban enables InnovaFeed to harness the plant’s waste energy.
Innovafeed produced 1.2 kg CO2 per kg of protein in 2025, and is aiming to reduce that to about 0.6 kg CO equivalent per kg of protein by 2030 as further process and scale optimisations are achieved.
No limit on insect protein
The white paper argues that insect ingredients are often benchmarked against soybean meal and marine-resource meal at their mature, fully optimised state, while insects are still near the start of their scaling curve.
“Yet, the incumbent benchmarks are highly variable depending on the sources and mostly higher than insect-derived ingredients,” write the authors, giving examples of fish meal CO2 per kg ranging between 0.6 to 15.5, and soy protein concentrate or “SPC” 4.5 to 7.3 kg CO/kg. Both are also finite due to sustainable catch limits and the limited amount of farmland available.
“Soy will run out of land, fishmeal will run out of fish: you can pay more for them, but you can’t pay the planet to catch up. Insects add protein without drawing on either, and will get better with scale,” says Bézagu.
