Update on progress, from R&D, to trials to capital raising and customer engagement
We’ve been a bit quiet on this page and on our podcast page since we won an innovation award in Spain back in July.
That’s because we’ve been quite busy, getting stuff done.
Our work on trials has continued with the University of Granada, and our recently hired head of entomology, Fred, has been busy working with the team there. Our results are pretty impressive in terms of our pre-treatment of feedstock, and our conversion rate into protein and fertiliser.
For a quick update on where we’ve got to, check the podcast with my colleagues Ben and Ignacio, on progress made so far.
The headlines are these:
- We’ve proven we can effectively convert olive waste to protein, fertiliser and insect oil using BSF larvae in both lab and real world trials in our demonstration factories
- This olive waste is what we call “green gold” as there is so much of it available, where our facilities are located. It’s replenished every year and it’s the largest supply of low cost feedstock in one place, in the world (as far as we know).
- We’ve raised significant capital to close our Seed financing round this month, so we are solvent, whilst we move to our next stage.
- That next stage is a large scale trial, scheduled to happen in Q1 2025, so we will have significant volumes of product to ship to customers for testing in products
- That stage is also about capital raising for our first factory and land purchase in Andalusia to site the factory on.
- We’re in conversations with a number of key customers about manufacturing what they need, to test our products and under NDA with some of the largest of them.
- We’re producing an initial Life Cycle Analysis assessment of our impact so we can prove that our products are hugely beneficial to the environment and can be used to replace highly unsustainable feed ingredients and existing fossil fertiliser products.
If you are wondering what is a Black Soldier Fly, and how we use their larvae to bioconvert waste, then this short podcast with Fred is worth a listen.
Finally for now, we are about to start field trials with our frass fertiliser, so I asked Fred to explain exactly what frass can do for plants and soils, particularly with regard to grape vines.
Feel free to contact us with any questions about any of this. We will post more updates soon.