Our love affair with flies began and the AgriProtein team developed the notion of industrialising nutrient upcycling using insect technology. Adopting a circular economy strategy, our vision was to make a material impact on the environment by closing the loop in aquaculture and agriculture production.
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 slowly built the beginnings of a business and now, an industry.
We built our first pilot plant at the Elsenburg in Stellenbosch and developed an international network of partner institutes including the Universities of Stellenbosch and Alicante, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Texas A&M.
A big break-through came in 2011 when we demonstrated our ability to produce insect protein at volume – output at our demonstration plant reached 100kg per day. The next challenge was to further increase scale while reducing costs to make our product commercially competitive.
We started building our first commercial scale factory (over 9,000m2) in Philippi, Cape Town.
Our first factory was completed and operational with the capacity to process up to 100 tonnes of food waste per day.
In November, we raised a further $17.5 million for expansion, valuing AgriProtein at $117 million and making it the most valuable fly-farming business in the world.
We signed an agreement with leading plant construction and industrial services company Christof Industries to roll out our facilities globally. Together, we developed a standardised, world leading, engineering factory design.
Our parent company successfully raised $105 million to fund our expansion, an industry leading amount at the time that took our overall fundraising efforts above $130 million in total.
We secured global partners to deploy our large-scale factories across key target markets, expanding our footprint globally. Today, our group company has offices in California, Singapore, Bangalore, Hong Kong and London. It also completed the acquisition of a business, Circular Organics, which is based in Europe.
We are dedicated to furthering the understanding and application of insect technology globally and have continued to build a team of industry leading specialists, across multiple functions. We are confident about the future of our technology and are committed to the continued development of our process and products in order to maximise factory efficiency and our impact.
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