Ÿnsect, a French Insect Farming Startup, Has Been Been Placed Into Liquidation
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The French insect farming startup Ÿnsect's shocking liquidation has sparked a lively debate about the viability of using insect protein as animal feed. While some commenters, like benregenspan, argue that Ÿnsect's pet food business had potential due to its sustainability benefits, others, such as mikestew and ErroneousBosh, point out that using insect protein as feed may not be as efficient or cost-effective as directly using grain or other by-products. The discussion reveals a mix of opinions, with some, like odie5533, dismissing the sustainability angle as a "terrible idea cloaked in lies," while others, like aitchnyu, highlight existing successful models that utilize insect farming to upcycle food waste into animal feed. As the conversation unfolds, it becomes clear that Ÿnsect's demise serves as a cautionary tale about the challenges of scaling innovative ideas without achieving product-market fit.
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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.
They should say "The great all-natural taste of mice and wasps that your cat loves!" based on observed behaviour.
If I was 1/150th the weight of a cow with my eyeline roughly level with the top of the animal's foot, armed with teeth about 12mm long and sharp claws about 5mm long, I suspect it would be considerably more difficult.
>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.
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.
Even a 20 m flight height means the taxi will reach 72 km/h before it hits the ground.
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.
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)
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.
Imagine being in a flying car. Nope nope nope!
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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45104757
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?
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. 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 !
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...
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."
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