How the farmed-insect frenzy lost its buzz.
“We have to get used to the idea of eating insects.”
This proclamation came from, of all people, an insect researcher. Dutch entomologist Marcel Dicke pitched eating bugs in his 2010 TED talk as critical to sustainably feeding a growing human population, because insects have a much smaller carbon footprint than beef, pork, and chicken.
To make his point, he even featured photographs of what might be a common meal in this bold new future: a stir-fry with mealworm larvae, mushrooms, and snap peas, finished with a chocolate dessert topped with a large fried cricket.
Three years later, the United Nations published a comprehensive report that echoed many of Dicke’s ideas and argued that insects could be a more eco-friendly food source not just for humans, but also for livestock. The report received widespread media coverage and helped to trigger a wave of investment from venture capital firms and governments alike into insect farming startups across Europe, the US, Canada, and beyond, totaling some $2 billion.
There’s a ring of truth, it turns out, to the conspiracy theory that the globalist elites want us to eat bugs.
This money was pouring into insect agriculture at a time when investors and policymakers were hungry for new models to fix the conventional meat industry’s massive carbon footprint. And what’s more disruptive and novel than farming and eating bugs?
You personally might recoil at the thought of eating fried crickets or roasted mealworms, but many cultures around the world consume insects, either caught from the wild or farmed on a small scale. And while grubs don’t feature prominently in current paleo cookbooks, our paleolithic ancestors most certainly ate plenty of bugs.
But the past decade has shown that even if you build an insect farm, the global market may not come. Of the 20 or so largest insect farming startups, almost a quarter have gone belly up in recent years, including the very largest, Ÿnsect, which ceased operations in December.
All told, shuttered insect farming startups account for almost half of all investment into the industry. “Things have gone from bad to worse for the big insect factory business model,” one insect farming CEO said late last year in a YouTube video.
And Vox can exclusively report that plans to build a large insect farm in Nebraska—a joint project between Tyson Foods, America’s largest meat company, and Protix, now the world’s second largest insect farming company—are indefinitely on hold.
Beyond the financial woes of the insect farming industry, some philosophers worry about the ethical implications of potentially farming tens of trillions of bugs for food, as emerging research suggests insects may well have some form of consciousness and hold the capacity to feel pain and suffer.
“Evidence is building that there’s a form of sentience there in insects,” Jonathan Birch, a philosopher at the London School of Economics who leads the Foundations of Animal Sentience project at the university, told me last year.
But it looks like they may not have too much to worry about. In spite of the initial hype surrounding the bug farming boom, the insect agriculture industry has learned just how difficult it is to compete with the incumbent, larger animal-based meat industry—and that, perhaps, it never really made sense to try doing so with bugs.
Insect farming is similar to other types of animal farming. The insects reproduce, and the offspring are raised in large numbers in factory-style buildings. Many of the same welfare concerns for farmed chickens and pigs are present on insect farms, like disease, cannibalism, and painful slaughter. In the case of insects, the creatures are killed by a variety of means. They might be frozen, baked, roasted, shredded, grond, microwaved, boiled, or suffocated.
In 2020, insect companies farmed an estimated 1 trillion bugs, and the most commonly farmed species today are black soldier fly larvae, mealworms, and crickets.
While some people might tell researchers they’re open to adding bugs to their diet, these smallest of animals remain a novelty food in the US and Europe, as opposed to a commodity capable of displacing wings or burgers.
“The human food market, basically, has not materialized,” Dustin Crummett, a philosopher and executive director of The Insect Institute—a nonprofit that researches the environmental and animal welfare implications of large-scale insect agriculture—told me. “Only a tiny fraction of farmed insects are used for human food.”
But insect farming startups haven’t only sought to put insects on our plates or grind them into protein bars; many want to sell insect meal (ground up insects) as feed for other farmed animals. It’s a sustainable alternative, they argue, to the soy fed to factory-farmed chickens and cattle, much of which is grown on deforested land. Insect meal could also replace fishmeal (largely composed of small, wild-caught species, like anchovies and sardines), which is fed to farmed fish and heavily contributes to overfishing.
This approach of farming insects for livestock feed, however, isn’t materializing either, and much of it comes down to cost.
According to a 2024 analysis published in the journal Food and Humanity and co-authored by Crummett, the cost of insect meal is about 10 times that of soybean meal and 3.5 times that of fishmeal, a major cost gap that is unlikely to narrow anytime soon.
Insect meal is so expensive, in part, because feeding insects is expensive. Farmed insects are typically fed agricultural “co-products”—like wheat bran and corn gluten—most of which is already fed to livestock, and so insect farmers have wound up in competition with big meat companies to buy up these ingredients. This simple fact weakens the narrative often driven by insect farming startups that they are putting food scraps that otherwise would’ve been thrown away to good use.
“Organic waste from the industry becomes feed for insects,” Protix’s website reads. “This circular food production mirrors nature’s circle of life.” But this is misleading; Protix feeds its insects ingredients like oat husk and starch, which are typically used in traditional livestock feed anyway. “It doesn’t really make sense to buy chicken feed to feed insects to feed to chicken,” as one insect farming startup founder told AgriTech Insights a couple of years ago.
And it’s not guaranteed that insect meal will be more sustainable than soy or fishmeal. According to a UK government report, the environmental impact of insect farming depends on a number of factors, including what insects are fed and whether startups power their farms with fossil fuels or renewable energy.
Energy usage explains a lot of the industry’s cost challenge. Farmed insects require warm temperatures, and in Europe, where so many of the startups are based, energy prices have sharply risen in recent years.
To lower costs and develop new revenue streams, some insect farming startups have pivoted to become “waste management” companies, too. Rotting food waste in landfills is a huge source of global greenhouse gas emissions, and insect farming companies can earn money by taking it off other companies’ hands and letting bugs eat it.
But here, too, the industry has run into obstacles, including strict EU regulations around what can be fed to insects and an inconsistent product. When insects are fed food waste, their final nutritional profile can vary widely depending on what they’re fed, but livestock feed companies need nutritional consistency.
And it turns out that even the largest and most powerful companies in the space can run into hard, economic realities when trying to rear bugs on waste en masse.
In late 2023, America’s biggest meat company, Tyson Foods, announced it had invested an undisclosed sum of money in Protix, a large Dutch insect farming startup. That Tyson was putting its weight behind it seemed like much-needed proof that insects could be the future of food, as so many startups, investors, and researchers had claimed.
The two companies planned to build a massive insect farm together near Tyson’s cattle slaughterhouse in Dakota City, Nebraska. At the insect farm, Protix would raise and kill around 70,000 tons of larvae annually—what I estimate to be approximately 300 billion individual insects. The bugs would feed on cattle paunch, partially digested plant matter removed from the stomachs of cattle slaughtered at Tyson’s plant. After a few weeks of feeding on the animal waste, the larvae would be slaughtered and ground up into insect meal, destined to become food for pets and livestock.
It was a way for Tyson to “derive value” from its waste, as it told CNN.
Now, Vox can exclusively report that Tyson Foods has withdrawn its air permit application to build the plant, and the plant itself is “on hold indefinitely.” That’s according to email exchanges last December between Tyson Foods and the Nebraska Department of Water, Energy, and Environment, which were obtained through public records requests by the nonprofit Society for the Protection of Insects.
Tyson and Protix did not respond to questions for this story.
The companies’ stalled plans aren’t unique in the insect farming space.
In early 2024, Innovafeed—currently the largest insect farming startup—opened a pilot plant in Decatur, Illinois, in partnership with ADM, the massive food and livestock feed manufacturing company. The US Department of Agriculture awarded Innovafeed a $11.7 million grant to turn insect waste into fertilizer at the plant, but a year and a half after it opened, it suspended operations, citing funding challenges.
Through a public records request, Society for the Protection of Insects obtained over 600 pages of documents pertaining to the grant, though about half of it is redacted, including much of the environmental review and Innovafeed’s commercial records. Last week, the organization sued the USDA over the heavy redactions, arguing it’s in the public’s interest to fully disclose the details of the deal.
The USDA declined to comment on pending litigation, and Innovafeed did not respond to questions for this story.
The biggest blow to the industry yet came late last year when the largest startup of them all—France-based Ÿnsect, which had raised over $600 million, representing nearly a full third of the sector’s funding—ran out of money. And a quarter of that backing had come from the French government. A recent whistleblower investigation alleged severe mismanagement at Ÿnsect’s production facility that led to filthy conditions and health problems for workers. The company didn’t respond to a request for comment.
As insect farming startups struggle to stay afloat, their main trade group—the International Platform of Insects for Food and Feed (IPIFF)—is going so far as to call on the European Union to mandate publicly funded food services, like school cafeterias, to buy insect meat and publicly owned farms to buy insect meal to feed to their animals. IPIFF didn’t respond to an interview request for this story, nor did the North American Coalition for Insect Agriculture.
As for the outlook of the insect farming sector, more startups will probably go under in the years ahead, and for the survivors to continue on, they may need to leave Europe and North America for warmer climates and lower operating costs.
But the rise, fall, and resettling of the industry isn’t uncommon in the agricultural technology field, Crummett says. Vertical farming, for example, seemed like a great idea on paper, but it’s been an economic failure.
Perhaps the greatest revelation of the Department of Government Efficiency, apart from the sheer, staggering scale of the pork, was just how much of it was being funnelled through USAID—and, of course, where it was going and to whom.
All of a sudden, we discovered that literally everything awful in the world—from drag-queen storytime in Vanu’atu and sex-changes for dwarfs in Morocco, to research into rare aardvark viruses and cat-torture in China—all of it was being paid for with US taxpayer money via USAID.
Fancy that!?
So why not insect-farming too?
It certainly fits the bill. It’s evil and disgusting and runs counter to all our deepest, most fundamental instincts; it serves no real purpose except to degrade, humiliate and elicit sniggers—if not uproarious laughter—from those who came up with the idea and would never, under any circumstances, do it themselves.
In short, it’s perfect.
Well, I did a little digging and, to my surprise, it doesn’t look like the US taxpayer was propping up the global insect-farming industry, not really. USAID made a “request for information” in 2022, meaning it was looking for input on how it could invest in the industry, but other than that it was just a few small-scale projects in places like Uganda, Madagascar and Indonesia to help farmers feed their livestock with black soldier flies or dispose of waste by feeding it to worms—stuff like that.
So, it’s just a coincidence that insect-farming is on its last… legs, ahem, after Kekius Maximus took his gold-plated chainsaw to the United States Agency for International Development.
Anyway, none of this changes the fact that insect-farmers are, indeed, in very deep trouble.
A long article on Mother Jones examines the industry’s woes in detail, from its early days with so much promise, when billions of dollars poured into startups from venture-capital firms and governments; to today’s dismal prospects. In recent years, almost a quarter of the 20 largest insect-farming startups have now failed, including the biggest, Ynsect, which came tumbling down last December.
“Things have gone from bad to worse for the big insect factory business model,” one unhappy CEO said in a YouTube video.
Plans for further expansion, including the building of a massive insect farm in Nebraska by Tyson Foods, have been placed on indefinite hold.
As if to add insult to injury, moral philosophers are now proposing that, far from being ethical, bug-farming on an industrial scale is, like traditional farming, deeply immoral. Insects, apparently, have some form of consciousness, feel pain and may even have opinions about the final season of Stranger Things.
I pondered the question of insect sentience this morning while I sat on the toilet and watched a woodlouse meander across the bathroom floor. Frankly, I’m not convinced. But if moral philosophers—a useless lot, for the most part—can make life harder for insect-farmers, then I’m happy to let them do it.
End cruelty to mealworms! Worker ants of the world, unite—you have nothing to lose but your chains!
Energy-price increases have played a big role in the industry’s misery, driving up the cost of heating the enormous warehouses where the insects are farmed. Costs are especially high in Europe, where more sensible energy policies could have been devised by a four-year-old child with water on the brain.
It also turns out feeding insects is expensive—maybe even more expensive than feeding some larger animals, like fish. We were told the opposite.
But, of course, the biggest problem is that nobody wants to eat insects. Obviously. It doesn’t matter how many times we’re told “cockroach milk” is the next superfood, or that we have to eat crickets instead of chicken to save the planet from global boiling, people just don’t want to do it.
In large part, the problems of the insect-farmers are the problems of the so-called “alternative protein” industry more broadly.
Nobody wants to eat “plant-based meat” either, or “plant-based eggs,” or “lab-grown meat” or any other eldritch abomination spawned in a bioreactor and dressed up as a cruel mockery of Mother Nature’s perfection.
During the pandemic, the makers of these products started to change tack as it became clear sales were flagging and projections laughably optimistic. They turned from claims about taste and health benefits—which nobody really believed—to manipulation and shame-based marketing. The most notable example was the barf-inducing “Help Dad” campaign from “oat-milk” brand Oatly. Tragically unhip fathers were confronted by their broccoli-haired kids and put through a plant-based struggle-session at the fridge door. Dad’s crime? Reaching for a cold glass of cow’s milk instead of Oatly.
Unsurprisingly, despite market research that suggests shame is the best way to market oat milk and insects, consumers aren’t buying it. So long as there are free-market mechanisms driving what ends up on store shelves, consumers will keep on buying the real thing instead.
Which is why pressure groups are now trying to get government to step in and force consumers to buy insects. The International Platform of Insects for Food and Feed is calling on the European Union to mandate that taxpayer-funded food services, including school cafeterias, sell insect “meat” and that publicly owned farms feed their animals insectmeal—ground-up insects. Other groups are trying to do the same thing in the US.
Also:
Bug Out: the Insect-farming Industry Is Collapsing, for Reasons That Aren’t Hard To Guess