Insect Farming: Black Soldier Flies | How Flies Help Reduce Food Waste (ft. Better Origin)

Hello everyone, my name is Mihapipan. We are an insect technology slash insect farming company from Cambridge, UK. And yeah, I spend most of my days working with maggots. It's a really exciting sector. The goal here is to provide sustainable and renewable resources produced with insects from locally sourced biomass waste and food waste. Hello, come in. This is an example of, I guess, a sowage fly larvae towards the end of their larvae stage. So the brown ones like this one, this is what we call the pre-pupae. So these are before they turn into pupae. And once they pupate, they start transforming into flies. So this would be already a bit too late to harvest for most processes. But the white ones are kind of before that stage. You can see them there. So there you go. Maggot realness. So there's a growing demand for meat products around the world. There's a growing appetite, particularly, say, if you look at Asia and pigs, for example, but also in the Western world, our appetite for poultry is growing massively. It's one of the fastest growing meats. We rarely ask ourselves the question of actually, what do these animals eat in the first place? What do we feed them to grow this meat? And the answer to that is a lot of the protein input in particular relies on soy. So we produce huge amounts of soy around the world that is powering our meat growing industries. And, you know, soy is an absolutely fantastic crop from that perspective. It's very rich in protein, rich in fat. It's an established industry, so it's grown at large scale. And it's really powering most of the sort of livestock feed chains these days. But there's also downsides to it, right? I mean, soybeans require more and more land so we can meet demand. And a lot of that land comes at the cost of forests, particularly in South America. We all know that that's, you know, a growing problem. So what insects bring that's new to this game is the opportunity to use locally produced food waste, locally sourced biomass waste, and feed these to the insects to convert it into protein and fat, much like the properties of soy are. But what we can achieve with doing that is, you know, we're not going to completely replace soy. We are going to start supplementing it with more locally produced resources. If we start doing that, then we can start building a food system fit for the future that's much more sustainable. And it relies more on a local supply chain rather than coming from the other side of the world. Well, their ability to, particularly with black salted flies, it's their ability to eat essentially anything. They will, you know, happily eat vegetable waste and fruit waste, but they also eat animal byproducts, you know, slaughterhouse waste. I mean, they will eat all of that and turn it to a pretty good quality protein and fat and chitin output. So that, you know, this kind of like transformation factor just the sheer power they have to convert all this kind of waste into something. Obviously, we can't feed them all those things these days for legal and regulatory reasons. But, you know, as more research is done and you get a better understanding of it, then perhaps we will be able to do that. So I'm quite looking forward to that. I've been looking at them for four years now. There's definitely an element of like once you see them and touch them, it kind of changes it. Yeah. I kind of just keep hearing about maggots. OK, I don't know. Yeah, you know, then you touch them and you see them doing their thing. You're like, OK, that's quite interesting. You know, like it's not just grimy and all they're eating food waste and, you know, they're maggots like, you know, young plumbers. It's actually quite interesting creatures in their own right. And their capacity to convert waste into something good. I mean, it's fantastic.