[HN Gopher] Ynsect, a French insect farming startup, has been de...
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Ynsect, a French insect farming startup, has been declared bankrupt
Author : fcpguru
Score : 31 points
Date : 2025-12-27 00:03 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| xvxvx wrote:
| 'Ynsect focused on producing insect protein for animal feed and
| pet food'
|
| Surely nothing could go wrong feeding herbivorous animals a diet
| of insect protein...
| mikestew wrote:
| 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._
| odie5533 wrote:
| They fooled investors with the sustainability angle. What a
| huge waste of money on a terrible idea cloaked in lies about
| sustainability.
| benregenspan wrote:
| 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.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| 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.
| guywithahat wrote:
| 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
| conception wrote:
| From the article looks like fish feed.
| dmos62 wrote:
| >The fact that Ynsect 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, Ynsect exemplifies a broader European problem.
| "Ynsect 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.
| polytely wrote:
| I think in the case of flying taxi's is just that it is a
| moronic idea tho.
| ericd wrote:
| Because noise?
| xnx wrote:
| Flying taxis make a lot of sense for very specific areas
| (e.g. Manhattan) and applications (e.g. mountain rescue).
| ph4rsikal wrote:
| 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
| zerofor_conduct wrote:
| Ynsect-crushing reality - nobody really wants to eat bugs
| dieselgate wrote:
| "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.
| Retric wrote:
| People do however both keep pets and eat animals that eat
| insects, which is what the company was aiming for.
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(page generated 2025-12-31 23:00 UTC)