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Comment “BUGS” and I’ll send you the full deep dive.
$2 billion got poured into farming insects. 88% of that investment is gone. The biggest company burned €600M and made €656K in revenue. But nobody’s covering the real story, which is that the bugs actually worked. What killed them was the commodity they were trying to replace. New piece breaks down the soy supply chain, the Cerrado deforestation, and the companies that survived by building something nobody expected.
#economics #insects #soy #agriculture
Transcript
$2,000,000,000 just got incinerated trying to form insects at industrial scale, and everyone's covering this as a story about how bugs were a stupid idea. But that's not the story. The biggest insect company on Earth raised €600,000,000, a third of it from the French government. But in 2023, they made 656,000 revenue against 80,000,000 in losses, which means that for every euro earned, they burned more than a 100, enough to make even the most tenured fart coin investors cringe. Yet as most non AI investments in the post reserve economy have gone, the whole sector collapsed from 88% from peak, and nearly half of all capital ever deployed went to companies that are now dead. And the supply chain was genuinely absurd because the insects eat the same feed chickens already eat. So you had startups buying chicken feed to feed bugs to grind into meals to sell back to chickens in The Netherlands in January while heating the barns to 80 degrees. And rightfully no, everyone looks at this and good, see, bugs were always a dumb idea. But here's what nobody's saying: the bugs worse. Production best dropped 40% in four years. Facilities went from 50 to over 300 worse. The biology was technically flawless. What killed this industry is the
