The economics of large-scale insect farming have come sharply into focus this week with struggling industry pioneer Ÿnsect “exploring all possible options, including the possibility of a third-party takeover,” while fellow French startup Agronutris has filed a safeguard plan with a commercial court.
The news comes weeks after Canadian cricket farmer Aspire Food Group laid off two thirds of its staff and announced plans to scale back production to conserve cash while it makes improvements to its process.
Founded in 2011 by Antoine Hubert and Alexis Angot, Ÿnsect has raised almost $580 million over the past 13 years from investors including Astanor, BPI France, Crédit Agricole, Upfront, and Robert Downey Jr.’s Footprint Coalition.
The firm, which honed its mealworm farming process at a pilot facility in Dole, France, started protein production at a large-scale facility in Amiens, France, last summer, but needs to secure more funding to get to a scale whereby it can “ensure profitability.”
Ÿnsect, which filed a safeguard plan with a commercial court last September, issued a tender offer on January 17 to determine interest from potential investors or acquirers by February 17, 2025.
According to the document, Ÿnsect’s revenue was €5.8 million ($6 million) in 2023 with “third-party liabilities” of approximately €104 million ($108 million) excluding bonds. “The figures for 2024 are not consolidated for the moment,” said a spokesperson.
The company, which has 214 employees at facilities in Amiens, Dôle, Evry, and Paris, says it needs to secure about €130 million ($135 million), excluding liabilities, to achieve target revenues of €131 million ($137 million) in 2028.
If no investors come forward by February 17, 2025, the company could face court-imposed restructuring, forced asset sales, or liquidation.
The spokesperson told AgFunderNews that it is “important to distinguish between the deadline for the submission of bids and the filing of the balance sheet [a formal declaration of insolvency], which are two different things.”
“At InnovaFeed, we have chosen a modular development model to secure our industrial and technological ramp-up. The challenges that our French counterparts are encountering to move from the experimental phase to industrial scale operations we have overcome a couple of years ago, as have other players such as Protix.” Maye Walraven, general manager, USA, Innovafeed
‘Ÿnsect remains focused on its strategy’
The company—which told us last fall that it was in “advanced discussions with a certain number of investors wishing to support and finance this launch phase of its industrial process”—told us this morning that “Ÿnsect remains focused on its strategy and its determination to rapidly find solutions to prepare the company’s future and meet the demands of a fast-growing market.”
The spokesperson added: “Ÿnsect is still in safeguard proceedings, but its activities are continuing normally, as are discussions with the various investors already identified.
“In this context, the priority of the Ÿnsect teams and the court-appointed administrator remains the same: to explore all possible options, including the possibility of a third-party takeover, in order to boost business and strengthen the company’s position in a demanding economic environment. As is customary in this type of procedure, a call for tenders to find investors or buyers for the disposal plan was published on January 17, to enable the company to sound out the market in parallel with its ongoing discussions with investors.”
The safeguard procedure, overseen by an officer appointed by the court, is designed to help companies that are facing financial difficulties but are not yet insolvent to continue operating and pay off debts.

Agronutris files safeguard plan with French court
Fellow French insect ag startup Agronutris, meanwhile, has filed a safeguard procedure with a commercial court in Sedan for its holding company EAP Group. Based in Toulouse, EAP Group is responsible for Agronutris’ R&D activities and administrative functions. The agreement does not cover the group’s subsidiary Ardennutris, which produces oils and proteins from black soldier flies at Rethel in the Ardennes.
The safeguard procedure, which lasts for six months but can be renewed for an additional six months, gives EAP Group breathing space to restructure, find new investors, and renegotiate its debt.
Agronutris originally focused on human food but later pivoted to focus on aquaculture and pet food. It raised €100 million in October 2021 from backers including SPI fund and the Mirova fund to construct the commercial-scale facility at Rethel, which started production in 2023 and announced partnerships with BioMar (insect meal for aquaculture) and Frayssinet (insect frass for fertilizers).
However, the funding environment has changed significantly since 2021, noted the company, which said in the release that grim news from others players in the segment had further soured investor sentiment. “Access to financing is made more difficult by an uncertain economic context and investors slowed down by the news in the sector and the announcements made recently by other industrial players”.
‘A supply-constrained market’
A spokesman for Agronutris told us: “In practice, this decision reflects EAP Group’s commitment to giving itself time to stabilize its financial situation, renegotiate its debt with creditors, and ensure operational continuity.”
“The site’s full production capacity is estimated at 5,000 tons per year, which is expected to be reached by the end of 2025. Today, this [insect ag] market is under capacity, as industrial players in the sector face the urgent need to find alternatives to fishmeal. Insect meal presents itself as a relevant and innovative solution, offering nutritional quality equivalent to that of fishmeal. This has driven strong market growth, but the industrialization of insect meal production has not yet caught up with demand, leading to a supply-constrained market.”
He added: “It is important to highlight that Agronutris operates a development model based on a fully operational production site that is scaling up. The company’s BSFL products stand out from other sector players in two key ways: They can be produced in smaller facilities while achieving the same production volumes as companies manufacturing cricket or mealworm-based products, and they offer a low-carbon solution, with significantly lower CO2 emissions per ton produced compared to cricket or mealworm-based alternatives.”
New generation learning from pioneers’ mistakes
One industry source told AgFunderNews: “There is definitely viability to the industry and massive operations are successful across the world. But some of these noisier players—Ÿnsect sucked up a lot of the attention from the media, as well as investor dollars—were early movers with a lot of the challenges pioneers face, and had specific individual flaws or challenges in their approaches or technologies.
“I think there are lot of comparisons to the indoor ag space in leafy greens, where you also have winners and losers, but a key difference is there is no existing ‘field based’ insect agriculture. So there’s a combination of the learning curve being larger, and there being a big market creation challenge, for which we are largely over the hump, with wide scale BSF approvals in most markets.
“That being said, some of the more successful insect operations are lower tech, more ‘back to basics’ in their approach such as those in Southeast Asia, which are not doing the massive automation and robotics that are so expensive and necessary in some of the geographies where we are seeing big failures such as Europe.”
‘Existing investors and startups are not being transparent with these challenges’
However, Sandy Singh Sandhu, former CFO at Singapore-based Entobel, argued that “There is little proof to show that there are more successful operations in Southeast Asia… in fact, operations in Southeast Asia have mostly suffered during increased temperatures due to the lack of resilience in designing their plants. Most have underestimated capex. Hatching and mating rates have fallen during the dry seasons resulting in significantly lower yield. This has resulted in the platforms needing to invest additional capex to install temperature control solutions to mitigate the temperature fluctuations. This is just one of the many issues that have not been accurately discussed.”
Better Origin: ‘No one wants to pay a significant premium in agri-food for a ‘green’ alt anything’
Miha Pipan, cofounder and CSO at UK-based BSFL farmer Better Origin, told us: “It’s clear to me after a decade in this sector no one wants to pay a significant premium in agri-food for a ‘green’ alt anything. Expecting consumers to step up in a cost of living crisis is flawed, especially in light of growing polarization. We are also no longer in times where subsidizing at scale is politically or financially viable for most states, at least for Europe.
InnovaFeed: ‘Only the most robust models will survive‘
Maye Walraven, general manager, USA, at French insect ag firm Innovafeed, told us that the challenges faced by some of its French counterparts did not mean that the whole segment was doomed.
“At InnovaFeed, we have chosen a modular development model to secure our industrial and technological ramp-up. The challenges that our French counterparts are encountering to move from the experimental phase to industrial scale operations we have overcome a couple of years ago, as have other players such as Protix, and we continue to successfully ramp-up our capacity in France in line with our strategic goals.”
Despite a challenging funding environment, she added, “We benefit from the support of strong strategic investors who closely follow our trajectory and who, based on our track record, are confident in our ability to successfully deploy the insect industry. We are nevertheless very aware of our responsibility to optimize our financial resources and make strategic decisions accordingly to remain lean and agile.”
She added: “The sector as a whole is making solid progress with larger volumes being produced than ever before and 100% of these volumes being absorbed by the market. Customers continue to believe the insect industry can help drive the transition towards a more sustainable and circular agriculture and support us via long-term partnerships. These recent events reflect the ‘Darwinian dynamics’ of emerging technologies and the fact that innovation is hard: not all companies can succeed, only the most robust models will survive.”
Funding rounds in insect agriculture, 2024 (US dollars):
- Entosystem (black soldier flies, Canada): $42 million
- Protix (black soldier flies, Netherlands): $40 million
- Tebrio (mealworms, Spain): $32.6 million
- FreezeM (black soldier fly neonates for breeding, Israel): $14.2 million
- Nasekomo (insect ag franchisor, black soldier fly neonate supplier, Bulgaria): $8.7 million
- Entocycle (enabling tech for insect ag, UK): $2.6 million
- Oberland Agriscience (black soldier flies, Canada): Undisclosed
Source: Preliminary AgFunder data [disclosure: AgFunder is the parent company of AgFunderNews)
Further reading:
Oberland Agriscience nets new capital to scale Nova Scotia BSFL plant
Worms to wealth? Loopworm scales up insect protein plant, plans recombinant proteins from silkworms