Black soldier fly and other insect meals are still struggling to find their place in the animal feed landscape. But Canadian startup Oberland Agriscience is still moving head — albeit with a somewhat cautious approach.
The company moved into its first commercial-scale, 108,000 square-foot facility in Nova Scotia in October. But it doesn’t plan to immediately ramp up to full capacity, founder and CEO Greg Wanger said. Rather, the facility was designed to allow the company to gradually add capacity in stages as demand for insect meal grows.
At full capacity, the facility could take in 100 tons of organic waste and byproducts per day to feed black soldier fly larvae — making it one of the larger, but not the largest, facilities of its kind in Canada, Wanger said.
“There are bigger ones out there, but I decided it was more important to not bite off more than we could chew in our first commercial facility,” he said. “It’s more important that we run, and run for a long time.”
The insect meal industry is in a rather awkward stage of its development, Wanger said. Companies across the sector are producing black soldier fly larvae and insects at a scale unlike anything we’ve seen before — and yet the industry’s total capacity is still “not even a drop in the bucket” compared with the production of most other feed ingredients.
“We’re in this weird in-between where we’re making enough that you have to do something with it, but to the big consumers you are more of a nuisance to them until you get to a much larger scale,” Wanger said. “So it is an interesting place to be in. We are big enough to be noticed, but not so big that we’re a fraction of a percent” of the total feed ingredient industry.
Wanger also noted that while insect meal is approaching price parity with some protein feed ingredients like fishmeal and fish oil, the industry still struggles to compete on price — and that the company’s new facility was built with this particular pain point in mind. Insect production is an energy-intensive process, he said, and so the new factory was built to maximize efficiency. The company leaned heavily into automation, robotics and artificial intelligence, and even plans to install 1 megawatt of solar panels on the factory’s roof.
“Any kilowatt you save is one you don’t have to buy, and that helps with the operational costs,” Wanger said.
The planned phase-in of the plant’s capacity also reflects the company’s past approach to growth. Founded in 2017, the company spent years working out of a rented pilot facility with the goal of eliminating problems in its production processes before it sought to achieve scale, Wanger said. By 2021, the company had run for two years without incident and felt confident it was ready to move to commercial operations, he said. It began building the new facility in 2022.
Wanger said Oberland primarily sells its products to local farmers, including salmon and poultry producers. It is also speaking with some larger poultry and pet food producers, he said.