Empowering Innovators
Five deserving enterprises working to transform the food system earn top awards in year two of the Seeding The Future Global Food System Challenge.
Read an excerpt below from the piece written by Dale Buss for IFT Magazine highlighting the Seeding The Future Global Food System Challenge grand prize awarded to Food Systems for the Future to further our Black Solider Fly Larvae project in Rwanda.
Imagine converting a swirl of thousands of large black flies—they could have come from a horror movie scene—into a rich protein source for chickens that help feed thousands of malnourished Africans.
That’s the scenario, and the goal, of this Chicago-based organization that has been processing the inch-long fly larvae into feed at a pilot facility in Kigali, Rwanda. FSFI has joined with Afya Feed Ltd. and Protix, a Netherlands-based larvae-feed producer, to design a fully automated commercial production operation in one of Africa’s most food-insecure countries.
“The larvae replace other proteins that chickens and fish predominantly eat, and they seem to like them,” explains Shanoo Saran, managing director for FSFI’s Africa country operations.
The Seeding the Future Foundation awarded FSFI a Growth Grant last year, which the enterprise promptly leveraged into a business plan and memorandum of understanding with the government of Rwanda and other parties for the facility, resulting in the award of a Grand Prize this year.
“Now we’re in the process of working with an engineering firm, which the [Global Food System Challenge Grand Prize] has allowed us to do, to design the facility and the equipment and support our ability to come up with plans for capital expenditures to build the facility and a budget for operating the facility,” says FSFI founder and CEO Ertharin Cousin, a former executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme.
“Our goal is shovels in the ground in the first quarter of 2024,” Cousin continues. “With the new [Grand Prize] grant, we’re finalizing all of the costs. And until we could do that, we couldn’t get to the point of building a business case for this facility.”
While FSFI has been creating the business model, the humanitarian case for the black soldier fly larvae (BSFL) is clear: Southern Africa continues to experience a hunger crisis that has been exacerbated lately by increases in costs for feed and other inputs for the smallholder farmers who raise chickens and take their eggs to local markets. BSFL are an abundant resource whose inexpensive and highly automated production at scale has been demonstrated by Protix.
Here’s how the process works. It starts with a nutrient-rich, vegan feedstock for the flies to eat; in this case, it will come from the Kigali municipal waste management system, consisting of household, restaurant, and industrial products such as potato peels and corn cobs. The facility grinds all of that into the perfect coarseness for fly consumption. Meanwhile, the fly detritus and frass can be collected and sold as fertilizer or biomass for energy.
Hundreds of flies are contained in cubicles within the facility, with the feedstock, which they eat; then they lay thousands of eggs. In 35 days, in trays that hold about 60,000 eggs each, they mature into larvae, which the facility then harvests. The resulting chicken feed can be live larvae or ground into a meal, either of which can be mixed with maize and other components for the final feed.
“There are lots of small, labor-intensive BSFL facilities in Africa, but this will be the only automated facility like ones being constructed in the United States and Europe,” Cousin says. “This ensures we can move rapidly toward making eggs more affordable as well as bringing a new source of fertilizer to Rwanda.”