Ÿnsect, a French insect farming startup, has been been placed into liquidation
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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).
but, more important- prions are general. not specific to brain tissue.
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.
In any case, it truly is part of several state laws, including where I grew up, in Minnesota. You wouldn't believe what they feed pigs back there. All kinds of expired foods, pastries, candies, and other convenience store fare. That's what the law is meant to cover, including, "discarded or unused restaurant food."
So pig > pig or cow > cow is known to produce prions. I believe it's also somewhat proven that, say, pig > cow > pig does not produce prions in the same way. However, insect digestion is very different from vertebrate digestion, so it's not necessarily safe to assume that pig > cow > pig being safe means that pig > insect > pig would also be safe. However, it does prove that pig > insect > cow > pig would still be safe - the insects don't add a risk in themselves, we're just not certain that they eliminate the risk the same way vertebrate digestive systems do.
Because that's the biological equivalent of that catastrophic bug that only happens in very weird and very specific conditions
My understanding is they don't actually simulate or calculate (meta)stable states of proteins, but rather extrapolate on known folds of experimentally confirmed proteins (basically peeking at what types of folds are found in similar sequences in other proteins. then known as homologous proteins).
How proteins get folded, unfolded, refolded etc depends on the exact cellular or vacuolar environment.
AlphaFold isn't trained on the environment, it only sees the known mappings from genetic sequence to protein structure. It is patently unaware of any environmental aid or frustration in correctly folding a protein.
An incorrectly folded protein structure (putative prion structure) and its correctly folded structure share the same genetic sequence. AlphaFold is effectively blind, it was just trained on correctly folded proteins with known structure.
Unless future versions of alphafold use ML to speed up actual QM or molecular modelling calculations
I don't see how alphafold can help enumerate all potential misfolds of all proteins generated or preserved in an animal of species A and consumed in an animal of species B, and calculate all possible ways a misfolded protein from A may act as a prion in B.
Which is to say that things are likely even a bit worse than you seem to be making out.
But unless it is demonstrated that insect digestive systems have some magical enzyme that can do what autoclaves can't, that is break down prions, then it cannot be assumed safe.
a. how does that solve the transmission problem?
b. amazing work by EU bureaucrats to regulate businesses that dont exist yet
c. they can export the feed to fish farms or china or whatever. the question is do the economics work. US soy bean is just incredibly productive (and subsidized)
We banned all kinds of such "forced cannibalism" after BSE, yes. And for good reason, I think - not just is it highly unethical IMHO, but because even a minuscule risk of a repeat of the BSE crisis of the late 90s/early 00s just isn't worth it. The destruction that BSE brought upon the European agriculture industry, the public outrage - I doubt non-Europeans could even understand the impact it had.
[1] https://www.giveblood.ie/can-i-give-blood/keeping-blood-safe...
[2] https://www.blutspendedienst-west.de/magazin/blutspende/mehr...
[3] https://www.rki.de/DE/Themen/Infektionskrankheiten/Blut-und-...
https://www.sanquin.nl/system/files/2025-05/sq_beleidsregel-...
Why?
Because feeding cows cows wasn't proved unsafe and therefore allowed in the food chain. Then people started dying. Oopsie.
But it's OK. It better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidan...
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
Of course, this has nothing to do with “Westerners.” No one in their right mind would want farm animals to be fed insect powder. The fact that the company was allowed to operate and to receive massive funding is the real issue here.
Why?
I don't really see how insect powder would be worse than the flour they get now. You don't even need to turn the bugs into a powder.
Likewise, cows would never eat a carcass cow, but as hamburger mixed with a lot of grass...
Yes, they do that
> and discriminate between insects
Yeah, they do not do that.
They also eat mice, which I guess came as quite a surprise to the cat that was stalking the mouse, although not half as much as to the mouse.
No, actually showing how the sausage is made does NOT stop people from wanting it. I honestly think that people like knowing how fake/cruel things are! People want the comically fake look and taste. See Mar-a-Lago face and its popularity. Hopefully AI or something can "engineer the human spirit" away from this horrible tendency.
Related, Asians seem to love to take westerners absolute worst food and act like it's okay despite being absolute "food divas" otherwise. Asians (in their own countries) will unironically eat kraft singles on their ramen and use spam everywhere, while simultaneously gloating that "they only go out to eat for food that's hard to make at home" and lamenting about how disgusting fast food is.
You won't win anything by trying to show people how gross food is. You think bugs are gross to people? Remember fear factor?
I really don't concede the point. Kids see food they aren't accustomed to eating blended together and fed to them by people they trust (Oliver is a celebrity in the UK).
What they aren't seeing is the chicken eggs they're eating was laid by a hen that was shat on by the chicken above it while sitting on a bed made of the cadaver of the chicken that held the pen before it.
For steak, I disagree with the article about stigma of eating bugs. Feeding cows bugs will save money, no doubt, and that might help cost on the low end of the beef market. Steak is a different thing though. A "bug-raised, bug-finished" steak would have to be incredible to overcome the stigma.
Similarly with whisky - some folks care deeply some of the time about a particular whisky made by a particular distillery in a particular way in a particular place. This is fun and interesting and there is a lot to appreciate there. That doesn't mean there isnt a massive market for "well" whisky or the flavored ones where they mix up all the lower quality whisky they can get their hands on in bulk then add cinnamon or peanut butter syrup to it until people drink it again.
In the same way people generally don't LIKE the conditions of food animals it doesn't prevent their purchase, especially if it reduces cost or increases availability.
>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 expect the exact same is true for birds - the kinds of effects that allow birds to fly with so little energy compared to a propeller-based aircraft are almost certainly not scalable, due to the fundamental properties of air as a gas. As far as I know, bird flight is made possible by complex turbulence effects induced by the microscopic structure of their feathers. It's very unlikely this effect could skale to 100kg of weight.
Piloted ornithopter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-qS7oN-3tA
Human-powered ornithopter: https://youtu.be/0E77j1imdhQ?si=Dd5hLla27Pz8gJNe&t=100
Also, Quetzalcoatlus northropi could've been powerful enough to carry a human.
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.
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...
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.
That's where the problem is.
When Airbus was doing the math on these a few years ago, the pilot cost was also one of the main concerns, so it was "autonomous or bust", and they ended up investing a lot on the autonomous side (not just the aircraft but also urban traffic management, etc).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Potomac_River_mid-air_col...
Literally any failure of the aircraft means you die.
https://stopthechopnynj.org/safety-and-terrorism/?utm_source...
And yet!
How is that any different from an automobile navigating the ridiculously crowded streets?
In a place with fewer pedestrians I'd buy that airborne vehicles might have a higher chance of hitting a person because they could crash somewhere that a traditional taxi couldn't. But when the place is packed wall to wall with people an arms length away I don't think that applies anymore. At least it doesn't seem self evident to me.
At the same time an aircraft is much more precarious. If anything in the fuel, engine, transmission, props, or control surfaces go wrong it will come down and fast. They have much more potential energy than a car (because they are high up). They also typically have much more kinetic energy because they have to move faster to maintain lift if they are fixed winged, or they have to have fast rotating parts if they are rotary winged.
Even a 20 m flight height means the taxi will reach 72 km/h before it hits the ground.
Would you rather be hit by Skoda Octavia travelling at around 20mph out of control, or a "flying taxi" travelling at 110mph out of control?
Because that's how fast it would be travelling when it fell on you.
To fill with other uses, say pedestrians.
Taxi falls, pedestrians get crushed bellow, but now the vehicular speed isn't 20-30 mph tops, but the terminal velocity of the vehicle.
mv^2 is mean.
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.
The things people will do to not build bike paths.
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.
This is a coastal city at a fairly run-of-the-mill latitude, people build functional bike networks in much worse.
There needs to be an entire wholesale change in both infrastructure and culture to make bike-commuting workable in most extant cities.
Relatively speaking, the infrastructure is the easy part.
I think we'll get to the heat death of the universe before bike-commuting in Houston, Texas would ever be "a thing".
You know we have these things called "helicopters", right?
Are we — as a species — really going to spend until eternity grovelling around on the ground?
If not, then we need personal aircraft.
Other than wait to be on the ground again?
Even birds spend the majority of their times on the ground.
It is not. Wilderness rescues are extremely resource constrained due to the costs involved coupled with the fact that those in need of rescue were fully aware of the risks before they set out. There's a severe limit to how many tax dollars will go towards bailing adults out of situations of their own making. Lowering costs would quite literally save lives.
The earliest cars were replacing the animal muscle power of carriages--a trivially easy feat given that the most primitive steam and combustion engines easily 10x both the raw power, power-to-weight, and power-density of a team of horses.
You can't fly within 500 feet of any person, vehicle, or structure.
At 500 feet, literally any failure of the aircraft means you die about seven seconds later.
* 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.
Imagine being in a flying car. Nope nope nope!
If ground vehicles side-swipe, it's just an insurance claim. If flying vehicles sideswipe, it's a Problem(tm).
That makes me skeptical of all of these (minus the wind currents in cities, that might have taken a little longer).
It is not only not unique, but in fact extremely common for startups to be grifts around impossible technical promises, live a few years off gullible investors who have way more money than sens and/or for whom losing a few million dollars on a long shot is just as bad as me wasting a few dollars on a gizmo off Temu I know probably won't work, and which then die out because their ideas obviously couldn't work.
They even sometimes find a niche by pivoting to some vaguely related tech. Say, while flying taxis obviously won't work, a startup trying to build them might find itself developing into a small company building helicopter propeller blades for some specific niche.
Here's my sanity check when reading something like this on hn: What do you have me believe about the founder/investors? I understand that it's fun and common around here to be arrogant enough to presume that other people are absolute idiots, who are incredibly bad at their jobs, but I am not interested. If all you can bring are "duh" ideas, then that's a red flag.
Unless you can bring really insightful ideas, I am going to err on the side of the people who put years of their time into it and the people who put millions of dollars into it
Are they still going to be wrong? Of course. Am I likely to think the sidechair hn commentator is simply missing something in the bigger picture? Yes (and I can think of multiple concrete things in this case)
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.
Many people are against helicopters on the grounds of noise, safety and pollution. Electric taxis will be welcomed once they are certified and economical. They only need to do better than helicopters.
[0] - https://stopthechopnynj.org/frequently-asked-questions/
Do you believe helicopters are noisy because they're not electric ? Your electric taxi will do the same thing: they need propellers. Propellers that can carry up to 1 ton are fucking loud.
Electric taxis will never be welcomed because they are a dumb idea.
How about funding some housing for the people? Why is it that every city had new huge neighbourhoods built en-masse until the 1990s, and then suddenly stopped (with a few tiny exceptions)?
But hey, flying taxis, right?
Normally, you would start a small business/factory and scale with your business. Especially growing insect doesn't require a "mega factory".
But here, from the onset, they started from scratch and announced a mega investment to build a giant factory. Obviously getting hundreds of millions or even a billion, most from public funding as we could guess.
https://www.fishfarmingexpert.com/france-mealworm-molitors/n...
Like the huge megalomaniac project that, to french people, is the typical example of too huge to make sense step for a startup, that is expected to be a sink of funds.
Otherwise, there is a good article in english if you want straight to the point article about the history and concret reasons of failure in the following link:
https://www.onei-insectes.org/en/ynsect-difficultes-economiq...
- the bugs feed on crop waste instead of the animal waste of the target animals [1]
- they are also investing in vertical farming alongside the core business
still not profitable as of writing the linked article, however.
An interesting thing is solar farms are maybe 30-50 times more efficient than corn. So the above isn't insane on the face of it.
A chicken eating an insect who ate a plant could produce higher quality feed and thus chicken than if the chicken ate the plant directly.
It's actually a welfare issue for chickens. They have feathers, and they molt. Just like hair, feathers need methionine. Methionine is very hard to get solely from plant sources. If they don't get enough methionine they eat each other's feathers, not just the discarded feathers (which left on their own they do normally).
if you raise that much money and go under, its usually just fraud.
How do I know? My company is a minority partner in one such project (wind energy, we would provide instrumentation). It's infuriating, the head company has been trying to make one of the big energy providers pay for half the R&D, with no success, and the project will be closed. Lots of taxpayer money wasted for no result, and we won't make sales.
Because of these abuses, the french government is changing the financing rules. They will only finance small proof of concepts first, then a pilot project, and only then industrialisation issues (instead of financing all in one go).
Another thing would have been if they had worked with Black Soldier Flies and focused on sourcing feedstock for them and scaling in a cheaper manner -- cheap/modular bins that leverage their tendency to "self harvest" -- the BSF larvae will climb up a ramp when ready and drop right into a collection bucket.
Automating the care and feeding of those pods in a cost-conscious manner and then being able to package that facility at scale at the feedstock source, e.g., parking shipping containers at a dairy farm where they're happy to consume the livestock waste. Then collect and bring back to a central processing facility.
It's not that it's not a good idea, it's already there. It's that it's not a VC idea.
And it seems the market prooved my point
The fact that they were simultaneously pursuing animal, pet, and human product lines is just poor management. Exactly the kind of poor management that VC can encourage, mind you. Because VC pumps in tons of money and wants to see big plans.
They already do this, at scale, feeding people, all over the world. There is no "unlock" to invent some tech that makes it magically more efficient, cheaper, or otherwise more adoptable.
The only difference between them and their existing, already on the market competition is they don't owe investors 10x returns.
But a key difference with corn is that corn has been farmed for thousands of years. We know without a doubt there aren’t any low hanging fruit to make it more efficient. I think it’s a reasonable bet that insect farming might have some easy wins simply because (almost) nobody has tried it at scale before.
But it is not a goldmine. Dogs, cats etc have better teeth and like to eat a lot of meat, that humans generally does not eat: rabbit ears, tendons, throats, noses, etc.
Insect food is not that cheap. A lot of pet stores give out free treat samples. My dog normally loves all treats, but refuses to eat the the insect treats (before I realize they are made from insects).
I am sure there are companies making a good living making insect pet food. But it is probably not that obvious a choice.
Yum, liquidised insects
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.
Wolves scavenge opportunistically, but they are first apex predators. Their primary food drive is to hunt in packs for large game and gorge. Dogs are not so far removed.
Not to mention the issues with pea protein and lead content.
[1] https://www.jumbo.com/producten/damhert-nutrition-insecta-gr...
[2] https://www.theburningplatform.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/0...
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 !
And it's not like it was never tried. There are tribes and cultures that do it at tiny scales, which means humans used to do it and quit at some point in the past. It's removing not an insignificant Chesterton's Fence.
2. Ynsect main target was… non-human animal food.
How on earth did French taxpayers get roped into funding a moonshot startup whose entire goal was to make pet food out of insects..
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?
You don't need left there, there is no green right
But yes, the obvious place to start is to use it for feeding chickens and not humans. Why chickens? Because insects are part of their natural diet when they are free. There is just a bunch of infrastructure problems that need to be solved for that to work as insects have pretty different problems to solve compared to other parts of the food production chain.
If you put cows on a field for a day, wait three days for insects to infest their shit, then put chickens on the field, the chickens scratch through the cow shit and eat the bugs. The cow shit gets nicely spread out and fertilises the soil more quickly.
The problem with this system is that it doesn't allow rich people to screw mega bucks out of the government for doing no work at all.
Well connected people using government funds to finance their businesses.
They were clearly surfing on pure hype: green, local...
These initiative's will be back though. Likely armed with their lessons learned, like making the government compulse us into eating it. Sugar coat it by telling us it's only once per week, or how affordable it is since we increased the prices of proper food through red tape and taxes.
And as always their blood of life against the public's natural disgust will be lobbying, powered by being rooted in elitist thinking.
Centenarians i know are all on a plant based diet
Insects? why bother
While life expectancy at birth was ~30 for the whole history of humanity up until the mid 20th century, this doesn't in any way mean that average people died in their 30s. Instead, life expectancy was highly bi-modal: most people died as children (most before age 1, but still a large number before age ~15), and most of those that didn't die as children lived into their mid to late 50s.
Surely nothing could go wrong feeding herbivorous animals a diet of insect protein...
…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.
Better than letting it sit and rot, emitting massive amounts of methane in the process.
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.