Comment by oofbey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oofbey | Hacker News Reader

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Why do you think it’s not a VC idea? VC is necessary to scale up to large volume. It’s easy for me to believe that insect protein can be a good business at high volume but not low. At volume you can get economies of scale and efficiency and get your cost basis down, making things profitable that wouldn’t be profitable at lower volume. Makes sense on fundamentals without a lot of details. Sounds like they were just too ambitious and chased after a very large market with very thin margins. (Animal feed.) instead of a smaller market with thicker margins (pet food)

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.

For the same reason corn farming isn't.

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.

Good point there isn’t some magic unlock. Although maybe they were hoping to find one.

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.

Pet food might be more lucrative. Or fish food.

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.

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