With plans to introduce new products based on oil and biofuel processing byproducts, Ittinsect needed a new name that reflects the company’s broader vision, CEO Alessandro Romano said.
The company announced in mid-October that it planned to rebrand and become Ocean Twist Biotechnology to reflect its expanding operations. While the company still plans to continue its work with insect meal, recent successes with spent cakes from vegetable oil and biofuel production will prompt the company to introduce new products in 2025 and 2026, Romano said.
The new product lines will initially introduce blended proteins derived from insect meal and waste cake from vegetable oil processing, with products derived from biofuels waste to be added later, Romano said.
“We really wanted to show our attachment to the blue economy with this new name, especially because with our name, we get identified very much with insects and insect farming, and we’ve never actually done insect farming,” he said. “So we really wanted to go back one step and say, how do we tell this to the world? And eventually we said, how about we focus on our mission, and our mission is reducing the impact on the marine environment while improving the performance of fish farms and fish in general.”
As Ittinsect, the company developed a proprietary method of combining aspects of hydrolysis with fermentation to upgrade low-quality proteins into higher-value feed ingredients. Although initially intended to improve lower-quality insect meals, Romano said, the company has also experimented with methods of blending other forms of agricultural and industrial waste into its insect meals during this fermentation process.
The company was approached during the past year by energy companies that inquired whether this process could apply to spent press cakes from biofuel production, leading to concrete plans to commercialize the blended protein products beginning in 2025, Romano said.
Insect meal has struggled to achieve widespread adoption as a feed ingredient due to its relatively high cost of production and limited availability. And while Ocean Twist’s price point remains relatively high, the blended products should put the company on a path toward creating protein products that are cost-competitive with fish meal, Romano said.
“We really believe that there is a benefit in using both insect meal and agricultural side streams together,” Romano said. “Insect meal is a really good base of protein. It needs a bit of working, but it’s a really good base. But it’s expensive. So we see the challenge for feed manufacturers to adopt it as a single ingredient.”