Central London is not known for its farms. Yet under railway arches a five-minute walk from London Bridge station is a farm that breeds livestock in their hundreds of thousands every year. But there are no cows or chickens down on Entocycle’s farm; it focuses on an altogether different category of livestock – insects.
The business, which was launched in 2016, is now at the forefront of the UK’s growing insect farming sector. It sells its patented technology and modular farms across the globe.
It is a market that will only grow as agriculture looks for greener and more sustainable alternatives to the soya bean, 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 $8bn by 2030.
“What people don’t realise is that the UK imports 3.4m tonnes of soy, mainly from South America, with 90% to 95% of it feeding animals,” says Entocycle founder and chief executive Keiran Whitaker.
Entocycle uses 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 touches on biodiversity loss, deforestation, pressures of carbon, and our national food security.”
London-born Whitaker spent five years as a scuba instructor in Asia and the Americas before coming home to launch the business, which now has 32 employees. Entocycle works with multinational companies such as Swiss food processing machinery maker Bühler, and has raised more than $16m (£12.5m) from domestic and international investors.
Entocycle’s facility looks more factory than farm, with production lines, computer screens and robotic equipment all driven by AI. And its purpose is to grow an insect common in slightly warmer areas of Europe: hermetia illucens, the black soldier fly.
“Everyone goes to black soldier fly larvae. They are the fastest producers, the most hardy and they can eat the widest range of food,” says Whitaker.
The main reason for the insect’s popularity with animal feed producers is their rapid growth: the flies can grow to 5,000 times their body weight in as little as 12 days, from neonates less than a millimetre long to inch-long edible larvae. Females can produce between 600 and 1,000 eggs each, which adds 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 soya beans.
But it is not only as a food that the flies help the planet. They eat almost anything, so could provide a key 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 type of waste stream, including animal manure, being fed into what would essentially be an insect bioreactor that turns waste into animal, pet, or human food.”
These clear benefits 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 managed by AI. Better Origin is part of the Morrisons “carbon neutral egg” initiative, with eggs produced by chickens fed on insects, which are in turn fed on unsold fruit and vegetables from its supermarkets.
However, the UK is well behind the rest of Europe, which can boast several large insect companies and industrial farms.
In France, which is regarded as the centre of European insect farming, InnovaFeed has raised more than $450m from investors, and owns the world’s largest insect farm, spanning 55,000 sq metres and producing 15,000 tonnes of protein a 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 pigs, and means insect farmers can only sell to the fish or pet feed sector. The rules also say larvae can only be fed on “pre-consumer vegetable waste”, which means waste food and animal manure are banned.
“We are behind the EU [on regulation] as a Brexit thing. If we had stayed in for another six months, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” says Thomas Farrugia, founder and chief executive of “insect genetics company” Beta Bugs. He believes changes – expected next year – to these two rules to align with the EU could turbocharge the UK industry.
Based 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 wanting to farm their own insects.
“When I started out in 2017,” says Farrugia, “there were about six companies in this area. I would put that 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 insects should become a bigger part of human diets. While the western world has largely shunned eating insects, the UN estimates that about 2 billion people globally include them as part of their diet.
With the global population expected to hit 10.3 billion by 2050 and agricultural land and protein sources becoming more scarce, some see insect consumption as a way to enhance food security and tackle climate change.
But the British public is still far from convinced. A recent study by Edge Hill University in Lancashire found that only 13% of respondents would want to eat bugs regularly.
Some businesses are trying to change that. Oxford-based insect food processing company Bugvita buys crickets and mealworms from several 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 who are trying to build muscle, says founder Adam Banks, who started his business after returning from working in Mexico City, where snacking on insects is quite common.
“[The sector] hasn’t grown massively. Farms seem to come and go because the barrier to making a cost-effective product is pretty high,” says Banks, who farmed insects for a while before deciding he couldn’t make the economies work.
He also believes regulations are holding the sector back. After Brexit, the edible insect sector was no longer covered by EU novel food regulations, and the UK Food Standards Agency advised producers that there was no longer legal cover for selling edible insects. A transitional arrangement is now in place for certain species, but this came too late for Tiziana Di Costanzo.
Before Brexit she had set up Horizon Insects, selling edible locusts, crickets and mealworms, as well as “grow your own mealworm kits” from her shed in west London. The confusion over the post-Brexit rules forced her to stop.
“For me there was no future. Everything was effectively banned,” she says. She and her husband now offer insect cookery classes, teaching clients how to cook dishes such as bug burgers, pulse and mealworm patties and cricket bruschetta.
So while dried crickets and mealworms may not be hitting supermarket shelves quite yet, the need to reduce the environmental impact of farming means they are sure in the future to play a bigger part in both animal and human diets.
Entocycle’s Whitaker feels increasing that for humans, eating insects is not only a necessity, but natural.
“The apple falls from the tree, the worm eats the apple, and the bird eats the worm,” he says. “We are just doing that, but on a much larger scale.”
