Ÿnsect, a French insect farming startup, has been been placed into liquidation
techcrunch.com82 points by fcpguru 5 days ago
82 points by fcpguru 5 days ago
There's an rule in the EU that says you can't feed the insects pork and then let those insects go on to be fed to pigs (same for beef and chicken). This is intended to prevent the transmission of diseases like Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (like "mad cow disease"). As I understand it, this rule isn't because we have shown it's dangerous to do the pig -> insect -> pig chain but rather because we haven't shown that it's safe. Arnold van Huis and his team at Wageningen University are putting quite some energy researching the safety and lobbying the EU to change the rules based on the findings. At one of the talks those folks they said it's basically a black box of trying to get what kind of science the regulators will consider acceptable.
As you might guess, making sure the food waste you feed the insects doesn't have _any_ animal proteins in it is quite logistically challenging and so afaik nobody is doing that at a large scale.
I did quite a bit of research into the history of insects in the food system, especially in the Netherlands. While I was rooting for Ynsect and other big players to figure something good out I believe that it's a problem much better suited to a smaller scale (perhaps on the city level). Basically, have the food waste from various stores brought to a facility to be fed to insects and then let those insects be turned into whatever (pet food, fish food, trendy protein bars).
You'd have thought it wouldn't be the proteins in the input, but the prions in the output they would care about. They're remarkably resilient, it's not unreasonable to be cautious.
Agreed, this is one area where care should be taken. The effects of CJD are absolutely horrendous, and it’s easy to imagine that this might be a way to transmit it.
Our city just had a compost program. Throwing away compostable material into the provided bin was free. They put it into the city managed compost yards and then every weekend you could go down there and pick up bags of the finished product to use at home in your garden.
It's also the case that many states already have a "garbage feeding" program that allows food waste to be diverted into feed for commercial animal lots. The food has to meet certain criteria and be fully cooked and ready for human consumption before being discarded.
> But don’t be too quick to attribute its failure to the “ick” factor that many > Westerners feel about bugs.
I think this is a weird wording. I dont think you need to limit the ick factor to "Westerners" There are an awful lot of people out there who would feel the "ick" factor.
And even for some of those who do eat insects, they are specific insects, form specific places, prepared in traditional ways.
Not a powder of insects
>The fact that Ÿnsect failed doesn’t mean the entire insect farming sector is doomed. Competitor Innovafeed is reportedly holding up better, in part because it started with a smaller production site and is ramping up incrementally.
>For Prof. Haslam, Ÿnsect exemplifies a broader European problem. “Ÿnsect is a case study in Europe’s scaling gap. We fund moonshots. We underfund factories. We celebrate pilots. We abandon industrialization. See Northvolt [a struggling Swedish battery maker], Volocopter [a German air taxi startup], and Lilium [a failed German flying taxi company],” he said.
I think in the case of flying taxi's is just that it is a moronic idea tho.
Flying taxis make a lot of sense for very specific areas (e.g. Manhattan) and applications (e.g. mountain rescue).
Ain’t no way you want flying taxis in Manhattan. If two collide or one fails, you could kill dozens of people.
Maaaaybe instead of the tunnels and bridges, to increase throughput during rush hours, but even then we’re trying to have fewer vehicles in Manhattan, not more.
Also, I cannot imagine what it would be like to go through an intersection during the winter. You would be hit with a wall of cross-cutting wind tunneling down 50 blocks that no airborne device is going to handle well. Absolute nightmare.
Right. This wouldn't be point to point on the Manhattan grid, but from Manhattan Island back and forth to the airports.
I’m not an expert by any means, but one of the major impediments I would imagine to flying taxis carrying people is safety; there’s a _lot_ that has to be done before people board an airplane in terms of checks, paperwork, planning, etc.
The dream of “order a flying taxi on your phone and it takes you wherever you want in five minutes” isn’t really compatible with aviation safety culture (at least at the pilot level in the US). That’s not to say it can’t be done, but you probably need a lot of really good PR people to figure out how to say “we want to remove the safety controls from this so we can make money with it” and have people buy it.
aviation occupies a great deal of my attention, and there is a logic to everything that is done, based on actual provable, repeatable results. anything involved in high volume passenger aviation has to pass reliability tests that will dry your eyes out just reading through the synopsis, nothing is making it to the PR stage. I splain little bit, pick some fancy country full of rich people flying around, tell them that the US has just ripped the lid off airspace restrictions (again¹), and is now letting some kind of ubber drone thing loose , and quite litteraly instantly there will be calls for all flights going to the US to turn around as all insurance policys for commercial flights to the US will be null and void.
¹one of the few times the US has been forced to back down admit fault, and agree to changes. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/12/17/united...
i don't think mountain rescue is asking for a better vehicle. traditional helicopters work.
flying taxi startups, drone companies, jetpack companies, and all the other fantastical flying startyps keep trying to say they have applications in mountain rescue, but i'm pretty sure that's providing a lot more benefit to the flying taxi startup's pitch deck than it is to any mountain rescue operation.
China calls it the low-altitude economy, and besides human transportation there is a lot that can be done. Personally, I believe that propeller-driven devices are too dangerous and noisy, but there might be innovations coming out of China that Europe can't
Everything that flies is driven with a loud dangerous spinning thing (propeller)
What attribute should they have to make them more suited than helicopters? Silence ? Energy efficiency ? No landing pad ?
Lower noise, lower operating cost, lower purchase price, easier to pilot, more reliable (fewer parts), safer (redundancy), no emissions, faster time to air, configurable to requirements, etc.
Yes, I too want my space alien anti-gravity flying saucer. Those eggheads need to hurry it up.
> any kind of outdoor rescue
You know we have these things called "helicopters", right?
> Flying taxis make a lot of sense for very specific areas (e.g. Manhattan)
The things people will do to not build bike paths.
Unfortunately Manhattan doesn't seem like a great place for bikes. The weather is just too variable. Some daredevils will be out in any weather but for most people it's just not feasible about half of the days of the year.
Not that helicopters make any more sense. The city needs some car bans, and yes, bicycles are part of replacing that. But only mass transit will be able to move enough people when there's a foot of slush on the ground.
...ChatGPT? Such an odd take, to point at weather being variable.
This is a coastal city at a fairly run-of-the-mill latitude, people build functional bike networks in much worse.
What is moronic about the idea?
It's hard to pick just one reason, but off the top of my head:
* Any failure tends to turn flying things into unguided missiles
* Noise is extremely hard to control -- I did an FAA helicopter discovery lesson, and oof
* Cities tend to have difficult to manage wind currents and hit-or-miss visibility. I was in a skyscraper across from one hit by a helicopter trying and failing to land in 2019 -- there's reasons for city no-fly zones
* Limited landing sites makes them highly situational in the first place, unless you want your streets to be helipads, which you don't
These are all fairly intrinsic and not mitigable. I can think of more issues more in the sticks, but you get the idea.
The wind in NYC is no joke. In brooklyn yesterday there were gusts so strong that car alarms were going off. In some apartment buildings, the handicap-accessible automatic doors simply cannot open into the wind.
Imagine being in a flying car. Nope nope nope!
One more reason is that it cannot actually solve the traffic problem that it claims to solve. It might be able to solve it for rich people when they are the only ones that can afford to travel by air, but if the cost ever comes down low enough for the masses to afford it, I don’t see any reason that congestion wouldn’t be as bad or worse than it is now. And to me it’s not a good investment to improve things just for rich people.
There’s just a lot more space when you can move in three dimensions, so I don’t think the congestion limitations of non-flying cars are likely to be replicated. IIUC (I’m no expert) that’s one of the most attractive features of flying VTOL vehicles.
You're bandwidth-limited on a sparse serialized landing site map no matter what, and you need far higher distance margins that will eat up basically all of the dimensional advantages.
If ground vehicles side-swipe, it's just an insurance claim. If flying vehicles sideswipe, it's a Problem(tm).
I honestly think the most attractive features of VTOL vehicles are that they are from sci fi, and you can look up and see a bunch of empty space and wish you were there while sitting in traffic.
I am (usually) not willing to assume that the founders of highly technical startups would not consider something that I as an outsider would in the first 5 minutes of engaging with the topic.
That makes me skeptical of all of these (minus the wind currents in cities, that might have taken a little longer).
If a startup were able to truly solve the first two issues alone, they would not be burning those world-changing engineering solutions on flying taxis.
I don't know if a silent, fail-safe, and efficient method of flight is physically impossible or not, but I do know this is low on the list of applications it would be first seen in.
EDIT: I'm looking at the air taxi companies this thread started with, and no, they have not solved any of the relevant problems.
Founders can be chasing a dream and in doing so mesmerize investors. Or they capitalize on that same dream being the investor's. Even if it's not viable, it can still be really fun company to work for and/or earn money at. Even if there is a small lane for that sort of flying machine, the sheer number of companies purportedly working on something like that is suspect. Given the huge costs for development and certification, and the small number of vehicles that will really get deployed (certainly for the first so many years), there must be many that are never going to make their money back. I worked for a drone-adjacent company and now my LinkedIn is swamped with these startups.
Theranos was famously founded on pitches about blood testing from finger pricks that literally any phlebotomist and many people with a modest life science background could've told you were physically and statistically impossible on their face. You should be considerably less credulous toward startup grifters.
The reason why you (and everyone else) knows about Theranos is that it was unique, which serves as a bad signifier if you want to judge what is likely to happen with the next startup. Being in prison and losing billions of dollars is just not something most people get excited about.
The reason we know about Theranos is that it ended up in court. Plenty of other startups have had obviously impractical ideas that didn't go anywhere.
I'm letting my mind wander and thinking what a French insect wrangler looks like. I'm kind of imagining a mix between French style, a cowboy hat, and lab gear.
Or maybe a guy with a large incredibly smelly cheese who is trailed by a huge cloud of flies.
> bankrupt despite raising over $600 million, including from Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition, taxpayers, and many others.
How on earth did French taxpayers get roped into funding a moonshot startup whose entire goal was to make pet food out of insects..
Good question.
There seems to be strong lobbying for insects as human food, in particular from companies that would be happy feed us with their own shit as long as it's cheap and they could get away with it
The green-left seems to enjoy that idea. Exactly why is hard to tell - especially on HN, but let's say I don't think it's rational.
So I guess, successful lobbying?
Ynsect-crushing reality - nobody really wants to eat bugs
“Human food was never the focus”
I eagerly purchase insect/grub kibble for my dog - both fly and cricket based. Also a lot of vegetarian kibble, I am a vegetarian myself.
But still your dog doesn't really want to eat the bugs, it's just there's no bowl of steak next to it
Why not? Have you tried? I have, must've been almost 30 years ago now, at Wageningen University. They taste quite well, if well prepared (they were). Insect burgers are also nice. I liked Damhert's insect burger [1]. People just think too much it looks like [2]
[1] https://www.jumbo.com/producten/damhert-nutrition-insecta-gr...
[2] https://www.theburningplatform.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/0...
Yet most people over a certain age probably have without realising. Haribo, Tropicana, lots of fruit juices, sweets and dairy products used Cochineal.
People do however both keep pets and eat animals that eat insects, which is what the company was aiming for.
I would happily eat cricket protein if it were more scalably environmentally sustainable. I’m fine with milk, but cows aren’t helping our greenhouse sitchu.
Not to mention the issues with pea protein and lead content.
And here are some of the reasons why:
1. high risk of severe allergic reactions and cross-reactivity
2. contamination with pathogens, toxins, and heavy metals
3. digestive and nutritional drawbacks, including anti-nutrients (no pun intended) and imbalances
4. and last but not least, the good old precautionary principle: limited research on long-term human health impacts and emerging hazards
if you still want to eat zee bugz, consider yourself warned !
This is one of the posts on HN where I first read the dead comments. And they did not disappoint.
[flagged]
[flagged]
Because the natural order of things is wild shih tzus hunting down cows?
Wolves did hunt aurochs, and apparently, shih tzus are one of the closest related dogs to wild wolves: https://www.dogingtonpost.com/8-dog-breeds-closest-to-wolves...
Why would that be? Killing and having them eat chicken and lamb is morally superior how?
if u saw what goes into commercial animal feed u might feel different about trying to figure out better ways to do it...
…because most dogs just will eat bugs on their own, no outside influence necessary? I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make.
I am baffled as to why cat food is labelled up as having "The great all-natural taste of beef and lamb that your cat loves!" because if my cat could naturally eat beef then that would be fucking terrifying, a 4kg cat that can eat a 600kg cow.
They should say "The great all-natural taste of mice and wasps that your cat loves!" based on observed behaviour.
Cats love tuna. Why? Basically got a lot of the amino acids that taste good to them, just coincidence.
you eat beef and you're only 73kg and eating a 600kg cow! Baffling!
Thanks to tools, I'm a far more capable hunter than my cat. It's trivial for a human of any size to kill a slow moving cow. It's very hard to imagine any scenario where a domestic cat would be capable of hurting a cow, let alone kill and eat it.
[flagged]
Oh my god eat some beans. Eat some tofu, eat some black-eyed peas, eat some green peas, eat some lentils, eat some northern beans, eat some lima beans, eat some chickpeas
'Ÿnsect focused on producing insect protein for animal feed and pet food'
Surely nothing could go wrong feeding herbivorous animals a diet of insect protein...
Especially when you could have just fed them the grain directly:
…factory-scale insect production typically ends up relying on cereal by-products that are already usable as animal feed — meaning insect protein just adds an expensive extra step. For animal feed, the math simply wasn’t working.
They fooled investors with the sustainability angle. What a huge waste of money on a terrible idea cloaked in lies about sustainability.
It seems like their pet food business (where they were competing with input-intensive meat products) could genuinely have been sustainable, if they hadn't taken so much time to figure out that competing on livestock feed is hopeless.
This sounds like "draff", or distillery mash, where you get a huge lorryload of spent grain from brewing for very little money, which is still pretty damn nutritious for cows and sheep.
Better than letting it sit and rot, emitting massive amounts of methane in the process.
plant protein is vastly inferior to animal protein. they don't feed livestock fishmeal for the hell of it.
The quote you make doesn't mention herbivores.
Cat food contains insect protein, and cats are carnivores. They even catch and eat insects themselves.
In contrast, cats are being fed grains which they wouldn't naturally eat.
Moreover, insects are a cheap source of animal protein.
Not all agricultural animals are herbivores. Pigs and chickens are both omnivores. Also insects are probably good feed for some species of farmed fish.
I mean most pets are carnivores or omnivores, it sounds to me like they just scaled up before they had really found product-market fit
