Our more recent history and business started out in 2008. Whilst visiting a landfill site, we could not help noticing the flies everywhere. As children in the North of England we had always fished with flies on the end of lines or larvae on the end of hooks. So began our love affair with flies. The team developed the notion of nutrient recycling and a vision to make a material impact by closing loops in aquaculture and agriculture thereby reducing the environmental impact of how we make and dispose of our food.
Once we had mastered some of the basic farming techniques we moved on to explore and further develop the science. From early proximate analysis, amino acid tests and nutritional studies we were slowly building the beginnings of a business and indeed an industry.
In 2010 we built our first pilot plant at Elsenburg, an experimental farm. We rapidly built an international network of partner institutes – including the Universities of Stellenbosch and Alicante, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Texas (A&M), Rhodes and many more.
In November 2014 we started building our first commercial scale factory of over 9,000 M2 in Philippi at the end of Cape Town International Airport’s main runway. It is in an area of economic hardship, from which we draw over half of our fantastic staff.
We have recently announced our tie-up with Christof Industries who have become our outsourced engineering department and EPC partner. Together we have developed a standard 250 tonne per day plant and will have the capacity to roll out up to 25 of these factories per year. We are building up our licensing, regional management and biology teams to be able to deal with the rollout of nearly two factories a month.
Given the global need for protein we have huge task as we prepare to get busy saving our seas – one factory at a time.
We have also created a specialist division dealing with manure and other specialist waste streams. The first large test facility of 30 tonnes per day capacity will go live in Q2 2017.
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