This is a summary of a research report that investigates costs of production at large Black Soldier Fly Larvae (BSFL) producers, and explores whether they can displace fishmeal as a feed ingredient at scale. You can request access to the full report here.

Key points

Over $1 billion has been invested into Black Soldier Fly Larvae (BSFL) farming since 2014.
BSFL producers have ambitions to displace fishmeal as a feed ingredient. If successful, this could unlock growth in aquaculture.
We investigated costs of production at four of the largest BSFL producers to better understand the prospects of them making major inroads into aquaculture feed.
We found production costs at these firms will most likely be too high to displace fishmeal.
We anticipate a smaller BSFL sector focused on high-value market segments rather than bulk feed commodities.
Our analysis has lots of caveats, including generalizability across different business models and geographies. Read the long summary or full report for more detail.

Executive summary

Significant investment has flowed into black soldier fly larvae (BSFL) farming, where producers have ambitions to create feed ingredients for aquaculture (aquafeed).
- Since 2014, over $1 billion has been invested into black soldier fly larvae (BSFL) farming.
- At present, BSFL producers mainly sell ingredients to the premium pet food market.
- But they have ambitions to position BSFL ingredients as a more sustainable alternative to fishmeal, an important feed commodity for farmed fish and shrimp.
- If these ambitions are realized, it could unlock growth in the aquaculture sector.
But the prospects of BSFL producers displacing fishmeal in aquafeed remain uncertain.
- Recent high–profile failures have raised questions about the future of the ‘insect as feed’ industry and the viability of BSFL producers making major inroads into aquafeed.
To shed light on this issue, we estimated production costs across four of the largest BSFL producers (by funds raised).
We estimate that production costs for these BSFL producers will be too high to meaningfully displace fishmeal.
- Our research suggests BSFL producers would need to keep production costs below $1,600 per tonne of dried insects in order to displace fishmeal at a meaningful scale.
- For a hypothetical ‘average producer’, we estimated median production costs to be double this: around $3.7K per metric tonne of dried insects (see Char

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