Ccentral London is not known for its farms. Yet under railway arches five minutes’ walk from London Bridge station is a farm that breeds cattle in their hundreds of thousands every year. But there are no cows or chickens on Entocycle’s farm; it focuses on a completely different category of livestock – insects.
Launched in 2016, the business is now at the forefront of the UK’s growing insect farming sector. It supplies insects for livestock feed, but also sells its patented technology and modular farms around the world.
It’s a market that will only grow as agriculture looks for greener and more sustainable alternatives to the soybean, which dominates the animal feed business but is a major contributor to deforestation and carbon emissions, with products transported thousands of miles. Barclays estimates the global insect protein market will be worth up to $8 billion by 2030.
“What people don’t realize is that the UK imports 3.4 million tonnes of soya, mainly from South America, with 90% to 95% of that going to animal feed,” says Keiran Whitaker, founder and CEO of Entocycle.
Entocycle is using its London Bridge showroom to prove to potential customers and investors that the technology works. Whitaker says: “Insects provide a sustainable and local source of protein that addresses biodiversity loss, deforestation, carbon pressure and our national food security.”
Born in London, Whitaker spent five years as a scuba instructor in Asia and the Americas before coming home to start the business, which now has 32 employees. Entocycle works with multinational companies such as Swiss food processing machinery manufacturer Bühler, and has raised more than $16m (£12.5m) from local and international investors.
Entocycle’s facility looks more factory than farm, with production lines, computer screens and robotic equipment all powered by AI. And its purpose is to grow an insect that is common in slightly warmer areas of Europe: hermetia illucensthe black soldier flies.
“Everyone goes to black soldier fly larvae. They are the fastest producers, the hardiest and they can eat the widest variety of food,” says Whitaker.
The main reason for the insect’s popularity with livestock feed producers is their rapid growth: the flies can grow up to 5,000 times their body weight in as little as 12 days, from newborns less than a millimeter long to inch-long edible larvae. Females can produce between 600 and 1,000 eggs each, adding to their selling point as efficient protein creators.
A 2020 study by the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa found that half a hectare of the larvae can produce more protein than 52 hectares of soybeans.
But it is not only as food that the flies help the planet. They eat almost anything, so can provide a turnkey solution for waste management companies, restaurants and supermarkets.
“We waste 40% of the food we produce,” says Whitaker, who is now in contract talks with supermarket and restaurant chains as well as waste management companies.
“What you want to see in the long term is essentially every kind of waste stream, including animal manure, fed into what would essentially be an insect bioreactor that turns waste into animal, pet or human food.”
These clear advantages have attracted other UK companies to insect farming. The best known is Cambridge-based Better Origin, whose X1 insect farms are housed in shipping containers and run by AI. Better Origin is part of the Morrisons “carbon neutral egg” initiative, with eggs produced by chickens fed on insects, which in turn are fed on unsold fruit and vegetables from its supermarkets.
However, the UK lags far behind the rest of Europe, which boasts several large insect companies and industrial farms.
In France, considered the center of European insect farming, InnovaFeed has raised more than $450 million from investors, and owns the world’s largest insect farm, spanning 55,000 square meters and producing 15,000 tons of protein per year.
Many believe the UK is held back by regulations, which ban the feeding of dead larvae, often sold in powder or pellet form, to chickens or cows, and mean insect farmers can only sell to the fish or pet food sector. The rules also state that larvae can only be fed on “pre-consumer vegetable waste”, meaning waste food and animal manure are prohibited.
“We are behind the EU [on regulation] as a Brexit thing. If we had stayed in for another six months, we wouldn’t have had this conversation,” says Thomas Farrugia, founder and CEO of the “insect genetics company” Beta Bugs. He believes changes – expected next year – to these two rules to bring them into line with the EU, could turbo-charge British industry.
Located near Edinburgh University’s Roslin Institute – where Dolly the cloned sheep was created – Beta Bugs is looking at ways to breed better black soldier flies and sells larvae and eggs to businesses that want to farm their own insects.
“When I started in 2017,” says Farrugia, “there were about six companies in this area. I would put it at about 15 to 20 now, and there are probably 30 in the pipeline.”
But insect farming does not stop at animal feed. There is a growing belief that insects should become a larger part of the human diet. While the Western world has largely avoided eating insects, the UN estimates that around 2 billion people worldwide include them as part of their diet.
With the world population expected to reach 10.3 billion by 2050 and agricultural land and protein sources becoming scarcer, some see insect consumption as a way to improve food security and tackle climate change.
But the British public is far from convinced. A recent study by Edge Hill University in Lancashire found that only 13% of respondents would regularly eat bugs.
Some businesses are trying to change that. Oxford-based insect food processing company Bugvita buys crickets and mealworms from various farms to make products, including packets of barbecue-flavoured crickets.
Bugvita’s cricket powder is sprinkled on porridge or included in protein shakes by people trying to build muscle, says founder Adam Banks, who started his business after returning from work in Mexico City, where snacking on insects is quite common.
“[The sector] did not grow massively. Farms seem to come and go because the hurdle to making a cost-effective product is quite high,” says Banks, who farmed insects for a while before deciding he couldn’t make the economics work.
He also believes that regulations are holding the sector back. After Brexit, the edible insect sector was no longer covered EU new food regulations, and the British Food Standards Agency has informed producers that there is no longer legal cover for the sale of edible insects. A transitional arrangement is now in place for certain species, but it has come too late for Tiziana Di Costanzo.
Before Brexit, she set up Horizon Insects, selling edible grasshoppers, crickets and mealworms, as well as “grow your own mealworm kits” from her West London shed. The confusion over the post-Brexit rules forced her to quit.
“For me there was no future. Everything is effectively banned,” she says. She and her husband now offer insect cooking classes, teaching customers how to cook dishes such as bug burgers, pulse and mealworms, and cricket bruschetta.
So, while dried crickets and mealworms may not be hitting supermarket shelves just yet, the need to reduce the environmental impact of farming means they are sure to play a larger role in both animal and human diets in the future.
Entocycle’s Whitaker increasingly feels that eating insects for humans is not just a necessity, but natural.
“The apple falls from the tree, the worm eats the apple, and the bird eats the worm,” he says. “We do just that, but on a much larger scale.”
