DESigning the Insect bioRefinery to contribute to a more sustainABLE agrifood industry – DESIRABLE

Project Desirable aims to cover the new insect industry as a whole, from organic waste collection to the final consumption of fish and poultry. Focus will be made on the innovative bioconversion and separation unit. Lab-scale and pilot-scale experiments will be undertaken for every biorefinery component: insect rearing, insect transformation and meals formulation. The global vision will be brought by the realization of a deep Life Cycle Assessment of the system

Several process pathways for extracting and fractionating the components of the insect have been tested and allowed to prepare several types of flour.

Project Desirable gathers excellent competencies on a very wide scientific range, either academic and SME. In-depth studies and analysis will be performed on every biorefinery component and will be globally consolidated at industry scale. Skills brought by public laboratories in the fields of entomology, food technology, biochemistry, animal nutrition, sensory analysis, consumer acceptance, environmental LCA, socio-economic LCA, as well as SME competencies in insect rearing and processing technologies will ensure the optimization of the insect biorefinery blueprints and the evaluation of industrial spinoffs.

Results will be published and presented in congress.

In a context of resource scarcity, population growth, environment destruction and food supply dependency, new solutions to produce food resources need to be explored. These solutions notably need to be environmentally safe, socially acceptable, healthy, relevantly nutritive, and economically loyal and realistic. An insect bioreactor seems a credible solution for human food production, as well as cosmetics, biomaterials, pharmaceutics and animal feed. Thus, insect was recently identified as a strategic development axis by several international institutions. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) promotes the development of the insect industry as a new resource for animal feed and human food. Since 2010, two large-scale European research projects have already been launched to anticipate and help the development of the emerging insect industry. France is represented in neither of them.

Following the second thematic axis of the ANR ALID 2012 call, Project DESIRABLE will notably explore a solution for underexploited waste streams, and for local supply of protein-rich materials, as the industry highly relies on importations of products that contribute to natural resources depletion. Our project aims to study and quantify the input of insect bioreactors in the valorization of underused industrial by-products by insect bioconversion upstream, and the relevance and sustainability of insects as a source of animal feed downstream. Even though insects also seem a pertinent source of food for humans, this thematic is partially explored in other European projects. Thus, Project DESIRABLE will focus on the potential incorporation of insects in fish & poultry diets, as a substitute for fish-based and soybean-based meals.

Project DESIRABLE is an ambitious and completely integrated research project, which aims to cover the new insect industry as a whole, from organic waste collection to the final consumption of fish and poultry. Focus will be made on the innovative bioconversion and separation unit, which will be called biorefinery in reference to similar projects using a vegetal reactor. Lab-scale and pilot-scale experiments will be undertaken for every biorefinery component: insect rearing, insect transformation and meals formulation. The global vision will be brought by the realization of a deep Life Cycle Assessment of the system.

Project DESIRABLE is based on the following fundamental hypothesis: (1) the sustainability of the insect alternative would notably rely on organic by-products utilization, in order to improve global waste management and limit competition with other treatment streams (2) the mealworm (Tenebrio molitor) and the black soldier fly (Hermetia illucens) will be the only insects studied in this project, as they are the object of many publications and seem to be pertinent species according to the literature.

Project DESIRABLE gathers excellent competencies on a very wide scientific range, either academic and SME. In-depth studies and analysis will be performed on every biorefinery component and will be globally consolidated at industry scale. Skills brought by public laboratories in the fields of entomology, food technology, biochemistry, animal nutrition, sensory analysis, consumer acceptance, environmental LCA, socio-economic LCA, as well as SME competencies in insect rearing and transformation technologies will ensure the optimization of the insect biorefinery blueprints and the evaluation of industrial spinoffs.

Project DESIRABLE constitutes a major milestone in the development of the innovative, local, sustainable and strategic insect industry.