By Jo Nova
In the renewable frenzy of the early 2020s Ÿnsect raised €600 million to “Reinvent the food chain” and pioneer alternative foods that “respect the planet’s boundaries”. Some $200 million of their funding came from hapless taxpayers somewhere. But in record time, seemingly before it began, it has already gone. Bankrupted. And not because people don’t want to eat mealworms (which they don’t) but because there wasn’t much market in making animal feed either. It turns out that farm owners didn’t want to spend 2 to 10 times as much on “sustainable” cattle fodder. So the company shifted focus to high end pet food, where besotted owners have money to spare, but that crashed too.
h/t Tom Nelson
How reality crushed Ÿnsect, the French startup that had raised over $600M for insect farming
By Anna Heim, TechCrunch
The company’s demise is hardly a surprise, as Ÿnsect had been embattled for months. Still, there is plenty to unpack about how a startup can go bankrupt despite raising over $600 million, including from Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition, taxpayers, and many others.
Ultimately, Ÿnsect failed to fulfill its ambition to “revolutionize the food chain” with insect-based protein. But don’t be too quick to attribute its failure to the “ick” factor that many Westerners feel about bugs. Human food was never its core focus.
It’s only money…
And revenue was the problem. According to publicly available data, Ÿnsect’s revenue from its main entity peaked at €17.8 million in 2021 (approximately $21 million) — a figure reportedly inflated by internal transfers between subsidiaries. By 2023, the company had racked up a net loss of €79.7 million ($94 million).
The vainglorious heady days of climate communism meant some bureaucrats thought it made sense to spend $200 million dollars feeding bugs to cows to try to change rainfall in 2100 AD.
Defenders of the faith will say this bug factory expanded far too fast, and it’s not the bugs that failed but the management. But the factory was plagued with problems from the start — including diseases, parasites, and fat worms that clog the machines.
In the biggest irony, insects need high temperatures to grow fast and the energy costs were killing them:
How the world leader in insects ended up in bankruptcy:
Behind this exciting showcase, the technical difficulties quickly become apparent. By attempting to raise mealworms (Tenebrio molitor), the company ventures into relatively unknown territory. It faces numerous complications: diseases, parasites, overly fatty worms clogging the machines, etc. Furthermore, insects require a high temperature to grow quickly (over 25°C), which leads to high energy costs, exacerbated by rising prices resulting from the war in Ukraine.
This is a dragon that eats its own tail.
The Green revolution kills the green revolution because energy is too expensive. Not to mention that fantasies of weather control attract terrible managers.
Lol. Birds eat insects and long may they keep doing it.
As for Humans, well NO.
Only the birdbrains have tried and they have gone broke. And are woke.
A great start to 2026.
Brillo !
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Shoulda been feeding the bugs to ducks … then feeding the ducks to people, whilst stuffing their doonas (duvets) full of duck down and offsetting the high energy costs by then using human poop to generate methane and provide nutrients to even more bugs.
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Oh, and how the Frenchies love their foie gras.
.
The circle of life, complete.
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A lot like the last thing to go through the brain of a bug as it hit the windscreen – they have had their asses driven right through their brains!
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How many people are aware that in fully woke Australia insects are being fed to children in “schools”?
Yet another example of how Australia is even more fanatically woke than Europeans or Kalifornianstanis.
As of a few years ago insects were provided in 1000 locations.
(Non-Australians, “snags” are sausages.)
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I don’t think community groups will engage in fundraising outside Bunnings by replacing snags with beetle burgers anytime soon.
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They also lie about the efficiency of feed conversion ratios. For the same diet crickets aren’t much different to chickens
See article for rest and link at article.
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Next thing we’ll have a “be kind to fatty bugs week” and endless howling online about showing proper respect to crickets, worms etc.
Why couldn’t they blow a cool one billion Euros on this delusional nonsense and be done with it?
But Russia, China, Nth Korea and Iran will be very pleased.
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I will guarantee that the grubs were not the only thing to get fat. The grubs that talked the gullible into donating their hard earned or hard taxed to hand over the loot also got very fat. Whenever someone means well there is someone who will take advantage of it. Ask the Minnesotans who are discovering that they have lost over $9 billion(US) to the Somali providers of health and welfare services who managed not to deliver health and welfare services but still charged the taxpayer.
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Absolutely.
I’d love to know what the executive salaries were at this massive failure of a commercial enterprise. Was the CEO ‘only’ pulling down seven-digits or was it eight? How about the board of directors? I’d be willing to bet a large percentage of the losses were due to executive compensation.
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wow. Thank god. Turns out no one wanted to eat ze bugs lol
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The usual answer from the Left when people don’t want to do something is to force them.
Next will be a move require a certain percentage of ze bugs to be put into food, and taxpayer subsidies.
Or indoctrinate children as is being done in Australian “schools” as per my references above.
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O Ye of little faith David. Australians are slowly awakening to the parlous state they are in courtesy of the socialists. 2026 will be the year of the great reveal. I hope.
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I wonder how you can humanely euthanise insects and still have them edible?
Has the RSPCA announced a process or offered endorsement, assuming of course that you pay a fee to them each year for the privilege.
I still wonder how an organisation which is for the preservation of animal life and values can be a supporter of processed chicken meat. Maybe they do a death row inmate service on the side too?
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do they use fly-swatters?
60
I think that’s how they de-bone them…. Although it could be very different considering that they have exoskeletons.
Or were you referring to the inmates?
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Goodness me, even the article describing the demise of a “climate change” industry due partly to high energy costs abused by the rush to wind and solar, tries to obfuscate by referencing the Ukraine/Russia war.
240
The wholesale gas price has dropped since the start of the war and gas is very good for heating.
00
That’s buzzyness for you.
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In 2025 the EU quietly authorised
“the placing on the market of UV-treated powder of whole Tenebrio molitor larvae (yellow mealworm) in… bread and rolls, cakes, pasta-based products, processed potato products, cheese and cheese products and fruit and vegetable compotes, intended for the general population.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ:L_202500089
For centuries we tried to keep mealworms and other insects OUT of our flour.
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Many years ago, while living in the Middle East, we made chocolate ice-cream one day. It was crunchy. It turned out that the crunchiness was from weevil wing-cases in the cocoa powder. No doubt about it – keeping these thjngs out of our food is a good idea.
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In Egypt in the 1950s we used to hold each slice of bread up to the light from the window, to check there were no ‘tasty’ weevils in it.
The bread was from the NAAFI (Navy, Army and Airforce Institute, iirc).
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In the days of sail, English sailors would eat their food in the dark, so they didn’t see the weevils in it.
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Patrick O’Brien joke, choose the lesser of two weevils.
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“The vainglorious heady days of climate communism”.
Love that description!!
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It’s amazing that CSIRO, which was once a premier Australian scientific research agency but now a fully woke instrument of Government policy that supports shutting down power stations etc. was once tasked with keeping insects OUT of the food supply.
Now they are tasked with putting insects INTO the “food” supply.
So not only is Australia going to become a “renewables” “superpower” but also an “insect” superpower as well.
Meanwhile the Government maintains its war against the farmer, particularly producers of traditional edible mammals and birds.
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Reality and Communism.
Like oil and water.
250
Insect farming might be a great industry with the right processing.
Basically, the exoskeleton and guts are removed by a suitably skilled operator in the art until the tender tasty muscle meat is revealed. The best meat would be around the legs and could make a delicious pate.
Think of the employment created if an army of skilled insect butchers tooled up with Carl Zeiss microscopes and microtomes could be employed to make real insect meat a reality 🙂 🙂
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The Ynsect bankruptcy will fall into the pile of failed green start ups. Much like Fortescue’s pointless green hydrogen project, there will be no forensic accounting, the money is squandered without the batting of an eyelid.
The Goodman group may have dodged a bullet by recognising this pattern. Midway through last year they announced they were going to build AI data centres in Australia.
https://commercialpropertymarketing.com.au/goodman-group-commits-4-billion-to-data-centres/
Fast forward to the end of last year and the Goodman group announces a huge investment in AI data centres in Europe. One country they’ll build in is France of course, nice and close to a nuclear reactor no doubt.
https://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/internet/goodman-group-partners-with-cppib-for-93-billion-data-centre-expansion-in-europe/126138832
Perhaps, Mr Goodman spoke to an electrical engineer and got wise…
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There was a time , probably back in the 1950’s & 60’s where Australia could have been sold to overseas investors very easily. Stable government, great weather , good people , tariffs protection but more importantly really cheap energy. Now, having great beaches and good weather are just not going to cut it, when we have some of the world’s most expensive electricity.
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Those with iphones can use this app for Oz.
https://appadvice.com/app/insect-food-scan/6472367915
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I understand that insectuous relations are illegal?
sarc.
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So much merriment in this article and comments! Thank you all.
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On another matter the Bureau has announced that Australia has had its 4th hottest temperatures on record. I did a random check of a dozen sites and found this to false. Most of the sites were cooler for 6 months of the year. The 2025 temperature map has most of Australia in yellow – denoting far above average recordings. This once again is shameless fabrication of the record under the ACORN dataset. For example weatherzone has a temperature graph for places in Australia which give the diurnal/nocturnal range and have the NSW regional city of ARmidale in yellow yet half the year it was below average
50
It was never serious. There were no customers, like Green hydrogen. And the cockroaches have taken the cash and bug-gered off.
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Real businesses establish customers first, secured if possible. Not like the $1Bn water pipeline to Gladstone at public cost just to supply Andrew Forrest’s Green hydrogen plant and he walked away as it was finished. Or the customers for Snowy II. Who are they? Who wants to lose 40% of their valuable electricity asset stored as pumped water at height? Most of these schemes have never had customers. Doesn’t anyone get commitments first? Or $1Bn wild speculation with shares at public expense in Quantum Energy?
Doesn’t anyone ever have to justify these mad schemes, especially with public money? And why doesn’t Parliament have oversight on such huge expenditure, left to the whim of our Prime Minister and friends?
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Regarding there being no forensic accounting to discover what happened when these schemes fail…consider some of the lyrics from Irving Berlin’s hit song ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’:
“There’s no people like show people, they smile when they are low
Angels come from everywhere with lots of jack, and when you lose it, there’s no attack
Where could you get money that you don’t give back? Let’s go on with the show”
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