In January, yellow mealworms were found safe for human consumption
Credit: Ynsect
The French city of Amiens is famed for its almond macaroons and for its pâté de canard d’Amiens, a duck pâté encased in pastry.
Antoine Hubert, the world’s biggest mealworm farmer, has a rather different local speciality in mind.
His company, Ynsect, is about to open the world’s largest insect farm which will have enough capacity to produce 100,000 tonnes of food from wriggling mealworms each year.
The passionate Frenchman believes these tiny creatures — which have a flavour similar to peanuts — are the future of food. Now, he plans to disrupt the $2 trillion meat industry by putting them on our dinner plates.
"Slowly consumers will get used to insects and then we will grow our business from niche markets like sports nutrition to the core of the meal and the plate," he says, with his soft French accent.
Next year, Ynsect will supply British supermarkets with ‘superfoods’ made from mealworms.
Ynsect plans to open the world’s largest insect farm next year
Credit: Ynsect
The industry was estimated to be worth around $152.2m in 2018 but exponential growth is expected over the next decade. The edible insects sector will be worth almost $8bn by 2030, according to data from Meticulous Research.
The research firm has tipped the industry to produce more than 732,000 tonnes of produce by the end of the decade as the demands of a growing population cause problems for the existing food chain.
And despite the ‘yuck’ factor, Hubert has good reason to place his faith and money on the bugs, which are largely made up of protein, fat and fibre.
Mealworms boast a host of health benefits. They are very high in protein and have also proven to significantly help reduce cholesterol in the liver and help breed microbiota in the gut.
The protein content of the insects, which are also less fatty than traditional meats, is around 72pc, which compares to the 31pc protein content found in a skinless chicken breast.
So beneficial are their properties, that in January, yellow mealworms were found safe for human consumption by the EU food agency.
Workers at the Ynsect factory
Credit: Ynsect
Hubert first became interested in insects as food in 2010 when alongside his co-founders Alexis Angot, Fabrice Berro, and Jean-Gabriel Levon, began exploring insects for human consumption in the hope they might help alleviate the climate challenges posed by farming.
With the help of a host of chefs, the founders tried out a range of prototypes from whole fried insects to mealworm burgers.
“Quickly we realised that acceptance was very low and the regulation was very complex,” he says.“We decided to stop the focus on human foods and shifted to where the demand was really big in animal feed.”
But insect-burgers may be back on the menu. The environmental cost associated with farming meat is enormous. More than a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gases come from food production, with half of that coming from meat and livestock produce, according to estimates from Our World in Data.
By contrast, the process of farming insects is believed to be carbon negative, largely due to the considerably lower usage of water, feed, and fertilisers.
Ground-up mealworms
Credit: Ynsect
In October, Hubert raised $372m (£268.4m) in a funding round that included actor Robert Downey Jr’s tech funding initiative. He’s using the funds to build his huge insect farm in Amiens in northern France.
Ynsect already has a vertical farm near the small town Dole in the Burgundy-Franche-Comte region, which harvests mealworms, or “molitor” in French. Once they reach optimal maturity, around 5pc of the mealworms are bred for reproduction and the others are transformed into ingredients — mainly protein powders and oils.
Those ingredients are then incorporated into recipes such as mealworm-based burgers, cookies, or protein bars, for humans or pet food.
Investors have eyed the potential of the sector, pouring in almost €550m (£478m) since 2017, according to figures from Dealroom.
Among them is Eric Archambeau, the co-founder of impact investment firm Astanor and a former Silicon Valley tech investor that has backed the likes of Free Now, Spotify, and Onfido.
Ynsect co-founder Antoine Hubert
Credit: Ynsect
His firm Astanor is among the lead backers in Ynsect and to Archambeau, insects will have their place alongside a host of other meat alternatives that make up the future of food.
“We think plant-based meat and milk and dairy products are super important, but they will need to be complemented by sustainable animal proteins,” he says.
“And we think the most sustainable one, the one that has a positive impact on the environment, is the insects.”
The former chairman of the Jamie Oliver Food Foundation says initially the burden will be on start-ups to drive the revolution toward insect-based foods.
“If you have an incumbent company that services billions of dollars of profit from being a leader in the market, then they have no incentive at all to create a revolution,” he says.
“So they will follow, they will be laggard. They will acquire some companies at some point when they have no choice, but don’t count on the Nestles and Unilevers of this world even if they have good intentions."
Despite the massive growth of the alternative meats sector in recent years, acceptance of insect-based foods remains low and a tricky barrier to overcome.
Supermarkets in the UK already stock some insect-based in products. In 2018, Sainsbury’s started stocking smoky BBQ crunch roasted crickets. The grocery chain has also just introduced cricket crackers in its "future brands trial bay", so the category still very much remains something of a novelty.
In a bid to tackle this, Ynsect plans to initially sell its mealworms sports nutrition products, where the insect protein can provide benefits around muscle regeneration and endurance.
Agronutris, the company whose mealworm application garnered approval from the EU’s food safety agency last month, says acceptance will gradually increase over time.
“Insect farming is a growing industry in Europe as our dietary habits are rapidly changing and the willingness of consumers to try insect-based food is increasing,” the company claims.
“The development of the insects as a food market in Europe would be driven by accessibility, consumer acceptance and sociocultural evolution.”
For Hubert, the dream of human consumption is closer than ever before.
"When we first launched the project around insects the idea was to open a restaurant serving insect-based food, but we realised that before consumers eating insects there would need to be insect producers," he says.
"With the current launch into human food, it’s like a return to our first love."
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