Technology-driven insect farming for sustainable animal feed

Speaker A: Foreign. This is Talking Digital Industries, the podcast for technologies and trends that drive sustainable digital enterprises. I'm your host, Alex Chavez. Today we're diving into a fascinating insect farming. Yes, you heard that right. Insects are being farmed as a sustainable source of animal feed, and Siemens Solutions are playing a key role in making that happen. We'll discuss how the digital twin and automation are shaping this new kind of factory. I have two experts with me. Matt Simmons, he's the managing director at Entocycle, and Keith Thornhill, head of food and beverage at Siemens UK and Ireland. Welcome to both of you.

Speaker B: Thank you.

Speaker C: Thank you.

Speaker A: Now, Matt, I think you've got a snack for us today.

Speaker B: Yeah. I got a little present for you, Alex. So this is from bugvita. This is lightly salted locust, crickets and mealworms. I thought you'd like some insect snacks to kick off the podcast.

Speaker A: Let's do it.

Speaker B: So here we go. I've not actually tried these before, so new to me too. Uh, would you like a locust, a cricket, or a mealworm or whatever? Help yourself.

Speaker A: Oh, my gosh. They really do look like.

Speaker B: Uh-huh.

Speaker A: Real insects.

Speaker B: They do.

Speaker A: Okay, what is this?

Speaker B: Uh, that is a locust.

Speaker A: A locust. Okay, here we go. What have you got there?

Speaker C: This is on a different level to last time.

Speaker B: It is, isn't it?

Speaker A: All right, here we go.

Speaker C: Ready?

Speaker A: It's crunch time, I guess. All right.

Speaker C: Mm.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: What do you think?

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it tastes nice.

Speaker A: Yeah?

Speaker C: Yeah, they do. Yeah.

Speaker A: A bit salty.

Speaker B: M. So I actually have a funny story for you. When I first joined End Cycle, I was getting into the world of insects. I knew very little about insects. So I was buying all these insects from, you know, wherever I could get my hands on them, downloading recipes and trying to make my own insect dishes. And I'd been on a couple of dates with this girl, and I thought, I'll offer to cook a dinner, see what happens. So she turns up, not knowing what to expect, and I greet her, uh, with this mealworm. Um, margarita cocktail. And then we had grasshopper stir fry for our main course. And then we had cricket brownies for dessert. Uh, and I thought, you know, this is going to go one of two ways, right? Like, she's either going to run a mile and never see her again, or maybe this relationship's got legs. And we are now together. We've been together for eight years. We've got a house and, uh, a kid together. So who knew that insects were the roots of a woman's heart?

Speaker A: Fantastic. But just to be sure, Entho cycles focus is not on insects for human consumption, but for animal feed. Is that right?

Speaker B: Correct. Yes. So we rear black soldier flies for animal feed. The reason we do it, there's actually two macro problems that we are tackling here simultaneously. So the first one is food waste. There are over a billion tons of food that are wasted every year. Um, causes a trillion dollars worth of cost to the global economy. Uh, produces 8 to 10% of greenhouse gas emissions is just from food waste. So food waste were a country, it would be third behind the US and China. It's a massive, massive problem. So what we do is we take food waste and we feed it to our insects and we can recycle that food waste. So we solve that problem. And then on the other hand, what we feed our animals is just wholly unsustainable. So what we do is we dredged 6 million tons of pelagic fish every year, causing massive environmental devastation. And we produce fish meal which goes into animal feed, into aquaculture, or we chop down the rainforest, one and a half acres a second to put things like soy plantations down for animal feed. So there's two massive problems there. What uh, we do is we take food waste, which is an issue, feed it to our insects and we create sustainable alternative to fish meal and soy and other types of less sustainable proteins. We feed that to animals.

Speaker A: What is the business model like?

Speaker B: We don't sell insects, we sell the technology behind it. So we're kind of the intel inside. If you like, customers can come to us and we can take them through a whole journey from a kind of explaining what an insect factory is and how that works, through to then going through a business case and feasibility study through to then delivering a full end to end turnkey solution as an industrial scale insect farm.

Speaker A: So here we are in a studio in Manchester. But I would love it if you could describe what this situation is like inside an endocycle facility. What would we see, what would we hear?

Speaker B: Okay, so we made the bold decision to build our, uh, main technology center in the heart of central London. So we are in four railway arches just south of London Bridge Station. Um, so the first thing that you would experience is no natural light. You would hear the rumbles of trains overhead as kicks Keith can attest to. Um, and then you would be probably greeted with pretty heady odor of insects. Keith.

Speaker C: Yes. Yeah, there's, it's a definite defining smell, I'd say. Yes, there's definitely an odor to the factory.

Speaker B: Okay, coming Back on the train, you get always get a seat because people don't want to sit next to you. You don't smell so good after a day in the office. But then you would see a whole bunch of technology and so I don't know what you had in mind when you think about an insect factory, but probably quite a sort of dirty process. This is a really sort of clean process. There's loads of automation in here, there's loads of precision controls to be able to make this process really efficient and to be able to operate consistently at scale. We've got things like our uh, machine vision neonate counter, so we can count and dose insects at the rate of 3,000 a second into crates. We've got robotic arms, we've got conveyor systems, we've got climate controlled chambers, we've got breeding cages, we've got a whole bunch of AI fly counters that can actually count flies in 3D space as we release flies into cages. And then we've got a whole bunch of Seamans PLC's automation equipment, SC equipment.

Speaker C: So yeah, it's a fascinating building really. The location clearly next to the shard. If anyone's been to central London, you know, this big building and then just, just down the road is this inset farm. It really is quite an amazing thing. But one of the things that we really got involved with in the early stages was, well, how you going to fit this production line in the space that you had? Yeah, and what we've done with Enter Cycle really is what we're doing with all sorts of different industries really. But it's how do you optimize the space to physically put production lines in? A lot of companies will do a trial and error thing. Oh yeah, it's about that big. So we buy a lot of capital equipment, we'll put it in and it sort of fits somehow. And you hadn't got the luxury for that because the space was so defining that you had to think, well, how can we fit this in? And that's where the hackathon came in in those early stages to understand, so what do you want to achieve? What is the entry point and what's the finish point? And this is the space. And that's when we started to think about the digital twin and develop and design how it fit into this space. And it's pretty tight, I guess, isn't it?

Speaker B: It's very tight, yeah.

Speaker C: There's no corner that's not utilized somehow. But the digital model allowed us to prove that out before they actually physically did it, which is the important thing and it all fit, which is, and it all fitted.

Speaker B: And I think not just that with the digital twin, but also because what we've got in central London is our uh, centre for inset technology. So this is a technology demonstrator. Uh, so you've got industrial scale modules, bits of equipment, but you may only have one or two of these in the centre for insert technology. What we do is we sell our technology to clients who are building an industrial scale facility. So we walk them around and say, you're going to need three of these, you're going to need 10 of these, whatever. But they say, I get it, I understand now what I'm buying and how this process works. So the digital twin and the simulation is really important for that sales journey as well for us because we can now say, right, you know what this looks like? And this looks like, here's what they will look like in say a 2D layout. But now we can show this is how it operates and you can see how process flows happen, how crates will move, move around the system. You can make sure that there's enough kind of transport time that the kind of throughput is correct. All of that has been able to be handled with simulation. So it's really important for us.

Speaker A: Is this a whole new business for Siemens?

Speaker C: It's a new sector that we call new food, if you like. And I know this is for pet food and animal feed, but that whole sustainability area of doing more with less covers a number of things. So within food and beverage, within Siemens, we have our traditional business areas of bakery, brewing, distilling and dairy. These sort of topics that have been around for many, many years, very predefined, this is the output, what we get. But this front end stuff of controlled environment agriculture, which is again another topic you could sort of say this is part of that discussion, is something that we're very focused on because these are the new factories that are going to go at scale and Siemens wants to be a part of that. And so that's the new bit for us. The actual technology side of it is not really any different to uh, producing a car or an insect farm. Um, but we want to be part of this growth area.

Speaker A: Matt, I'm curious to hear about some of the big challenges that you've had to face as a startup in a very new field.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, how long have you got? Um, yeah, look, it's been tough. When I first joined about eight years ago, day one for me was to march down to the pet Shop and buy a bag of black soldier flies, a cat litter tray to rear them in, some plastic boxes and tubs, a bag of dog food to feed them on. Like it was that kind of sort of scale that we were at. So it was very sort of hands on, buying a whole bunch of bits and pieces and sort of hacking together an insect farm. But that was so important to really understand what the process looked like and, you know, really get your hands dirty, literally dirty, and insects. And from that you can then start to figure out how do we automate this process? What are all the various stages that need to happen here? What skills do we need as a business to have solutions to each one of those stages? And how do we make this scalable and repeatable? That's been an eight year journey to get there. And now we have a team, we're nearly 30, we have some really world leading bits of equipment. We've got some amazing partners as well on that journey. So from a technological point of view, I think it's been really fascinating. And I think for me the thing that's really exciting about that is there are no defined ways of doing things. This is a whole new industry and there's just people don't know how to do this, uh, or didn't know certainly. It's like when the Wright brothers were crossing the channel for the first time and people were building aeroplanes in the start of the 20th century. It's that sort of stage of the industry. So actually from first principles, figuring out what that solution looks like is really interesting. So that's from a technology point of view, but then also from a business point of view. These can be used all the way around the world in sort of different situations. So some companies are focused on the sort of waste processing side of it. So more of the food waste than the protein production. And so you can actually get paid to process waste. But the waste is a kind of dirtier, uh, waste stream. Other people are having a cleaner sort of more repeatable input feedstock and they'll be going for a more premium protein market. So they'll be going on the sort of a bias towards the other side. The right level of automation, the right location, the right climate, the right kind of client and partner. There's so many things to figure out. But that's what's so interesting when you're

Speaker A: talking about the feed sources. Perhaps you could say a few words about that.

Speaker B: The black soldier fly will eat anything, like literally anything. So we've got a client in Kenya who are feeding them on human feces and they're actually using it as a way of creating good sanitation for townships. So they will collect human waste, they will put it to a central black soldier fly processing facility and they will be processing it with black soldier flies. They are nature's recyclers. They've been doing this for hundreds of millions of years. That's what they do. So it's nothing with weird about it. But in the uk, obviously, regulations are fairly stringent. It's a very new industry, so we are limited to what's called pre consumer food waste. So that is basically nothing that's been on someone's plate. So it's things like waste fruit and vegetables that, um, aren't sold in the supermarket. They've got to the end of their use by date. It could be from a fruit and veg packing line, it could be brewers grains or kind of whiskey sort of distillery byproducts, that kind of stuff. So it's traceable side streams really that we would process here. But hopefully as regulations change and we can demonstrate that they are nature's recyclers, this is a safe thing to do and there's loads of research to show that the more good we can do, so the more waste we can process, which is a really good thing.

Speaker A: What I really think is amazing is that you started off like you described, going to the pet shop and buying the black soldier flies. And here you are working with Siemens with very complex automation technology. Perhaps from your point of view, Keith, what was it like to come in to this do it yourself sort of environment?

Speaker C: Saw the before. So I'm walking into a pretty automated facility and the thing that hits you really is the importance around data. And it's a thing that we talk about a lot of our customers now that they may be automated, but it's how do they get more out of the automation if they're not automated, how do they automate? And it's normally the data is the key, but it's not just data, it's what you do with that data. And the good thing about these guys is from day one, they saw that technology was going to be the answer to make this really efficient operation. How, uh, they absolutely maximize the amount of egg count to the waste, for example, is data telling them that for the amount of waste that equates to so many eggs that are going to go in to really optimize that process. And there's an awful lot of companies that can learn from this process. Forget that it's insects, just the fact that the whole process engineering part of it is really, really important to a lot of companies and maximizing the yield is all data driven. Again, it's like, well, this is what we've produced. So let's take the data and let's see how we can tweak that. And the automation is doing its stuff. It's just doing the, okay, you want to tweak this, you want to treat that the automation looks after itself in a way to actually optimize the performance of that. And for us as Siemens, there's building management systems in this, uh, controlling the environment because the environment is key to the growth of the larvae. And so linking the automation from our DI world and our SI world is something that would be absolutely applicable to this type of application.

Speaker A: DI and SI stand for what?

Speaker C: Digital Industries and Smart Infrastructure.

Speaker A: Very good.

Speaker B: I think probably from, uh, we obviously started to collaborate really early on and actually probably from your point of view, you almost had a bit of a blank canvas with Enter Cycle, right? There was no sort of legacy system. And we've been doing this for 30 years and this is how we've always done it. So I think by the time we kind of met Siemens, we had a pretty decent understanding of the fundamentals. This is the process and this is how we want it to work. But then you've been able to sort of come in and influence that and start to talk about, well, you know, let's simulate some of this stuff. Here's a whole suite of tools. And that's been quite a fun journey to go on to sort of almost professionalize the first principle work that we've done and then figure out how to scale that up. Uh, it's been a good time to work together.

Speaker A: Maybe we can talk about some of the accomplishments of Entho Cycle. One of them is that reference center that you referred to in London. But I think there's more than that, isn't there?

Speaker B: Yes. So we have the center for Insight Technology that we opened in April last year. So, so that's kind of the culmination of all of this work over the last, nearly last decade of research. And now people can see the technology in action, which is a huge thing and a huge win as a sort of sales tool and to drive sales through the business. People can see it now. We have delivered a research center for Leeds University. So that's uh, bespoke system where they can actually analyze the efficiency and the safety of using black soldiers to process pig manure. Um, so it's a research center and we are now experts in processing different types of consistency of pig manure. You didn't know that there are different types and they're sort of figuring out what the perfect blend is for black soldier flies. But that's all part of what we do. Um, we signed a partnership with a company called Beulah who are a massive technology firm in agriculture and food processing. But they have an insect division. So we collaborate and we work on projects together. Um, through that we've developed and patented some core technology that's now in use in one of the biggest black solder fly production facilities in America. So yeah, there's been a lot of progress for sure.

Speaker A: You are approaching customers all over the world and I can imagine it might help that Siemens is on your side. Hugely.

Speaker B: Yeah, of course, yeah. One of the big challenges we have as a startup and now we're moving to scale up phase is credibility. Right. So to have the Siemens brand name behind Entercycle is huge. And it really helps just, you know, well, who are you working with while we're working with Siemens? That just makes a massive difference to how that conversation goes.

Speaker C: We were having a conversation earlier about potential customers for these guys because uh, every one of our customers is producing some sort of waste and what are they doing with that? Sometimes they're converting that waste into energy, which, you know, fair play and that's, that's something that's good but. And we're also trying to reduce the waste as part of the remit of what the automation can do. But there is those discussions about, well, how about selling as a byproduct is protein. And around that sustainability discussion, there's a lot of companies now interested in another way of turning that waste into something that could be a product for them on top of their normal product that we'd expect them to produce.

Speaker A: That really speaks to the idea of the Siemens ecosystem.

Speaker C: Absolutely.

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. I think the conversation we've had have been both around the technology and kind of what's the future look like, how can we help there? But also introducing us to waste water companies for example, because sludge waste and processing sludge is a really big problem. So is there a, uh, kind of interesting avenue there? So getting those kind of introductions has been great.

Speaker A: Keith, if we look five years down the road with the different technologies that are available today, where do you see them developing? What do you see being possible that isn't possible today?

Speaker C: Well, if I knew that, I'd be a rich man, wouldn't I? Um, so I just think the way that technology is going now is just continuing as the insight to drive continuous improvement. But one of the things that the food industry struggles with is variability because of its natural starting point interacting with the environment. And that variability often causes food waste. But the uh, energy to produce that food waste needs to be far more streamlined and technology will start to give us the answers of why things are changing. So if companies are uh, struggling with their production, it's generally down to variability and it's collisions on the factory floor that that variability is created. So technology will start to understand that better and create this adaptive world where it'll understand, it'll predict and it'll start to react automatically. And we're starting that journey pretty much now. So I think in five years time m, we'll very much be on that way.

Speaker B: So I can give you a great example of where that directly applies to end cycle. We have uh, big larvae growth chambers and the kind of most important thing to us is the yield of the larvae from an economic perspective. And you get variability there in terms of growth rates and yield. And so what we were able to detect in the climate control chambers is the gases, the temperature that's produced. So what's the heat load or the heat requirement for the certain life stage, how much CO2 is emitted, how much ammonia is emitted. And we are collecting that data at the moment to help us figure out when the optimal time of harvest is. And you get these sort of characteristic peaks and troughs and spikes and that uh, you can therefore, in real operating conditions you can say that we're either ahead or behind schedule, therefore turn up the heat or add some more humidity to be able to make sure that the larvae are ready when you need them to be ready.

Speaker A: That's amazing. And where would you like to see enthocycle in 5 years time?

Speaker B: Oh wow. So I think having an impact. We've spent, yeah, best part of a decade developing the technology. It's now about making something happen in terms of real impact at scale. So delivering multiple industrial scale insect farms around the world, being the go to provider of insect farming technology, uh, and scaling up and being able to say in five, 10 years time we're processing millions and millions of tons of food waste and we are saving millions tons of carbon. That's a real go.

Speaker A: Two very, very good visions. It's been a real pleasure to speak to both of you. I've learned so much about technology and how it can support a very innovative business like that of entocycle to our listeners. If you would like more information, you can Visit the webpage Siemens.com Agriculture this is talking Digital Industries. I'm, um, Alex Chavez. Thank you for staying with us. Do join us again soon. And in the meantime, why don't we have another look at the snacks and we can finish them off. What do you think?

Speaker C: Yeah, I love a locust.

Speaker B: Sounds good.

Speaker C: Thank you.

Speaker A: All right, then.

Speaker C: The big ones at the bottom there.