[TW] Hello, and welcome to an Insectbiotech Group podcast. My name is Toby Webb, and I am one of the co-founders and the Chief Sustainability and External Affairs Officer of the IBG. I’m here with our CEO, Ignacio Gavilan. So, welcome to the podcast, Ignacio.
[IG] Hi Toby, thank you.
[TW] We’re sitting here in Spain, discussing the sustainability aspects of our company. We’re doing separate podcasts about the pure-play financials and the plans, but we are also going to talk about that a bit here. However, we’re primarily focusing on the sustainability aspect because we’re a very mission-driven company.
We want to make a lot of money, but in a circular and sustainable way, by tackling serious problems and turning them into opportunities and positive outcomes. So, that’s what we’re talking about today. Let’s discuss the problem we’re trying to solve; there are a few of them, aren’t there? One of them is the enormous protein gap, meaning there’s a lot of protein needed and not enough available.
Secondly, there’s a big problem with climate change, and we think we can help with carbon removals by taking waste that would otherwise be burned or used poorly, and converting it into protein fertilizer.
Thirdly, there is a demand for non-fossil fuel-based fertilizer, specifically biogenic organic fertilizer, which can significantly impact agriculture. So, that’s another opportunity. I guess the last one, if we needed one more, is that we want to bring rural jobs to Andalucia highly paid jobs that deliver value for Communities and help secure the future of these regions because as we know we’re rural Spain like a lot of other rural areas of countries is fast becoming empty as people move to the cities.
So, we have an important social role to play as well. Those are the problems we’re trying to tackle. Ignacio why don’t you just give us a few key stats here perhaps to illustrate the points I’ve just made. [1:45]
[IG] Going back to your first point I think the animal in sector is right for disruption. Its based on rather unsustainable input those of us working on sustainability know it well, right? Roughly 5 million EU farmers raise animals for food production with a value for about 130 billion euros.
In addition, the 70 million pet owners in the EU buy roughly 10 million tons of feet for these pets and with the pandemic, this number has increased significantly every year. We need approximately 450 million tons of feed for animals. The current import for EU feed is basically compressive soy from Brazil and fish from the oceans to make fish meal.
If you look at soy, we all know Brazilian so production has recently seen deforestation, which is linked to 103 million tons of CO2 emissions, and if you look at the oceans, 37% of the almost 32 million tons of the world’s ocean fish that are caught are for animal feed. That doesn’t make any sense 90% of the catches turn into fish meal or fish oil, most of which is used as agricultural and aquaculture feed. Again animal protein sector – ripe for disruption. [3:00]
[TW] Well, that’s just one of the areas we’re tackling, but those stats are really, really helpful. Of course, the question the listener might have is, “Well, how are you doing that?” Well, in short, listener, what we’re going to do is take this olive waste and blend it with brewer’s spent grain and biscuit and baking waste. That will then be treated in some secret ways, and in a very sustainable way, of course, and fed to black soldier fly larvae. If you’ve ever seen the children’s cartoon or read the book “The Hungry Caterpillar,” it’s kind of similar to that.
The larvae eat voraciously for about two weeks, and while they eat, they poop and shed bits of their exoskeleton shell, whatever you might call it. That’s called chitin, and that drops in but with the poo below where they’re feeding. That’s our fertilizer, which also has a biopesticide element to it with the chitin and is also very good for soil health. Then, the larvae get fat, and we ethically slaughter them after 14 days with heat. They are then crushed, prepared, processed as required by customers [4:00] and then they are very high in protein, very high in amino acids, and minerals, the right kind of fats. They’d be perfect for a human diet, if only there wasn’t an enormous yuck factor which means none of us want to eat them. [4:00]
Cricket flour is one thing; black soldier fly protein bars, we’re not ready for them yet. But that doesn’t matter for us, because we know the demand for this product from pet food companies is enormous, from aquaculture companies, and then down the kind of pyramid, we’ve got chicken feed, pig feed, and possibly even cattle feed.
This is a product with an incredibly low environmental footprint. It displaces those unsustainable inputs that Ignacio just mentioned, but it offers a nutritional profile which is absolutely unrivaled. If you look at the science of cats and dogs’ nutrition, which we have been studying quite a lot over the last six months in some of the studies and some leading studies recently, dogs and cats fed on black soldier fly and insect protein were healthier than those fed on traditional pet foods.
Now, there’s a long way to go to prove that case absolutely, but even if it’s just equivalent, the carbon benefit and the environmental benefit is enormous. So, as you can probably tell, we’re terribly excited about this. So, I think that’s probably laid out the opportunity. Ignacio, what are we doing right now about this? How are we trying to seize upon this opportunity? [5:10]
[IG] We’ve concluded the phase where we are analyzing the substrate and have reached a comfortable point. We know these larvae eat olive pomace, along with the other substrates that you mentioned before. Let’s bring this to practice. I’m now living in Spain. We recently completed a trip to Andalusia, where we met with a number of key stakeholders, among them the University of Granada, with whom we set up a very interesting partnership.
We’re going to set up a small container, it’s called a grow box, a traditional 20-40 foot container, where we can test all the different substrates to get to a point where we can scale that up. In the next few months, we’re going to install this container. We have the help of an entomologist from the University, and we need to add to conversion rates, temperature control, and animal health to a point that we can scale that up.
We’re extremely excited for the next three to six months, running all of those tests. It’s going to be at the industrial park within the university. I’m sure a lot of students will love to stop by and touch the larvae. And once we have a great control on all of these different variables, we’ll scale up to a 10,000 square meter plant, and from that, in the next few years, up to four to five plants. [6:28]
[TW] We also want to put one of these grow-box shipping containers next to an olive oil mill. Let me tell you more about that. [6:35]
[IG] One of the keys here is to be next to where the sub-product is. We have another agreement with an olive crushing facility in Jaén, who has agreed to have another grow box. So, we have two: one in the university, and the other one in an actual olive crushing facility, next to it. This means no transportation cost for our inputs.
The owner is terribly excited because, just thinking about valorizing his olive pomace, which as of today is not truly valorized, thinking about selling that to other farmers as fertilizer, excites him very much. Also, as animal feed for the region, so technically, we could take a residue from one plant and sell it to the neighboring plants, which proves the circularity of all of this project. [7:17]
[TW] Listener, we have raised quite a bit of capital already, which is our pre-seed round, as these things can be called. We’re now in our seed round, where we’re looking for about the same again, perhaps about a million euros. And we know that impact investors, climate funds, and all this kind of thing, private equity, venture capital—I mean, they’re all different groups, but there’s lots of interest in this. Whenever we talk to them, a lot of them say, “Come back when you want three million.”
At the moment, we only want about another million to complete this testing phase. We then need about 35 million for our Series A. If you’re listening to this and you’re interested in the Series A financing, which we’ll start looking for next year, do get in touch.
The bridge in the middle that we need to cross is that extra bit of funding to get us through the testing phase. We’re looking to get local stakeholders involved in that, so high net-worth individuals, family offices, businesses in Spain, but if anyone out there is listening to this and is interested in getting involved outside of these things, do let us know.
Or, if you know someone in Spain who might want to invest in IBG, do contact us. Or, if you’re interested in the Series A financing, which will have excellent returns by the way, and we can talk you through them. All our predictions look very good because our input cost is pretty low, and our footprint is very low, but our output is very efficient. This is truly modern industrial manufacturing in the circular economy. Looking forward to hearing from anyone out there who’d like to work with us.
In the meantime, Ignacio, thanks so much for your insights and your time. Looking forward to the journey together towards truly circular manufacturing that tackles climate change.