Essay by Eric Worrall
First published JoNova, Tom Nelson – Even starving dogs wouldn’t eat their product?
How reality crushed Ÿnsect, the French startup that had raised over $600M for insect farming
Anna Heim
2:52 PM PST · December 26, 2025French startup Ÿnsect shot into the spotlight when “Iron Man” star Robert Downey Jr. touted its merits on the “Late Show” during Super Bowl weekend 2021. Now, nearly four years later, the insect farming company has been placed into judicial liquidation — essentially bankruptcy — for insolvency.
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And revenue was the problem. According to publicly available data, Ÿnsect’s revenue from its main entity peaked at €17.8 million in 2021 (approximately $21 million) — a figure reportedly inflated by internal transfers between subsidiaries. By 2023, the company had racked up a net loss of €79.7 million ($94 million).
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But the vision collided with market reality. Animal feed is a commodity market driven by price, not sustainability premiums. …
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The 2023 pivot to pet food came too late. By then, Ÿnsect had already committed to a massive, capital-intensive bet that would ultimately doom the company. That bet was Ÿnfarm, a “giga-factory” in Northern France that the company billed “the world’s most expensive bug farm.” Built for insect production at scale, the facility consumed hundreds of millions in funding — money spent before Ÿnsect had proven its business model or figured out its unit economics.
Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/26/how-reality-crushed-ynsect-the-french-startup-that-had-raised-over-600m-for-insect-farming/
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I love it when green activists and clueless Hollywood celebrities think they know how to run a business.
The fools blew hundreds of millions of dollars on a giant production plant, only to discover their target market didn’t exist. By the time they realised their original plan was a bust, they used internal transfers to inflate reported revenue, then tried to retool their plant for their new target market. But there wasn’t enough money left to solve their retooled plant production problems, so they ran out of cash.
Anyone who has ever run their own business knows that if possible you start small and field test your ideas, even if you have lots of capital burning a hole in your pocket. No business plan survives contact with reality, you have to test and refine your plan, and if necessary completely ditch the original plan and pivot into doing something new, while preserving as much capital as possible for the big push once your idea starts to generate revenue.
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That sounds like the old marketing joke
with the punchline “the dogs won’t eat
it”
Sorry Klaus, few want to eat ze bugs, voluntarily.
I can report that my chickens go crazy for dried meal worms.
Yep, fowls like bugs and worms.
they love ticks!
When splitting my firewood, the white grubs are carried around like trophies, and fought for by the chickens.
for them the grubs are probably like premium cheeseburgers 🙂
If they can force you to own nothing (America should become a nation of renters – Bloomberg /already testing the waters in 2021 ) and love it,
then they can easily force you to stop worrying and love the worms.
I have an old but well maintained guillotine in my shed that disagrees with that notion.
Also: see history
Bug off, Klaus !
😉
“You will eat nothing and you will be happy”…..
Dead, but happy.
Yeah, but what was this about from the start?
It wasn’t major science coming up with a new idea that would contribute towards the betterment of mankind . . .
No, it was a bunch of plonkers who saw potential for them to make individual fortunes, that opportunity at the expense of the taxpayer and bolstered by utterly ignorant and scientifically illiterate politicians.
Unless we get to a point in the western world, quickly, where politicians WILL be HELD FULLY ACCOUNTABLE for decisions they make whilst in office . . . government will continue to be driven, at our expense, by unaccountable stupid ridiculous impractical pathetic ideology-driven idiots . . . who actually consider they massively exceed all of us intellectually . . . and, of course, therefore have the right to completely ignore the concerns you and me may hold.
What do we have to do?
Do we have to resort to arms at some stage?
Maybe
Great comment !! 🙂
Completely revamp the so-called educational system… nothing else.
Go woke, go broke.
Seems that all these progressive stuff can only exist if someone else has paved the way by building infrastructure and wealth they can feed off.
That’s why they only exist in developed countries,subsidies or with USAID help.
That’s why it is literally inexistent in the rest of the world
that can neither afford legions of crazy people,crazier narratives nor parasitic scientists.
You’ve got to wonder whether the instigators of all these looney green ideas actually believe the fantasies themselves, or they’re just banking on soaking $$$s off all the naive “progressives” out there in Guardian readership demographics.
It is a grift, pure and simple.
How much you wanna bet this was heavily funded by NGOs which were heavily funded by US AID?
• Direct grants (e.g., a €20 million grant from the European Commission’s Bio-Based Industries Joint Undertaking under Horizon 2020 for the FARMYNG project to build a large-scale facility in France).
• Additional public support, such as €6 million in 2015 for a pilot farm.
• €4.34 million for the ŸNFABRE genetics program via France’s Investments for the Future Policy, managed by Bpifrance.
• Subsidies as part of larger funding rounds (e.g., in 2020, part of a €315+ million raise included debt and subsidies).
Incidentally, it’s USAID, the AID part does not mean aid.
So, sold off for pennies on the dollar and the lawyers will get all of that.
Growin’ them wasn’t the problem. The problem was with the roundups.
It turns out that they just don’t make lassos that small.
A real can of, er, annelids…
Good news .Bug off.
Oh dear,
what a shame,
never mind.
The salary of the Ynsect CEO is not public. But I bet it was plenty.
Especially if it got a nice taxpayer subsidy. !!
If I want to eat bugs, I will go outside and get some. It’s easy. Just turn over a rock or scrape aphids off of plants. I don’t need an international corporation to do it for me.
Note: I have never wanted or needed to eat bugs. Another clue that corporations and their investors involved in generating insect protein should be aware of.
Bit of an image problem, really…
Had an Aboriginal friend one who showed me how to find wichetty grubs.
He ate a couple, but I declined !!… I wasn’t that hungry 😉
Brings to mind that scene in “Quigley Down Under”.
I was once working on a forestry crew (I was a foremen of sorts)- one of the guys was the honcho of a local motorcycle “gang”. He said that to get invited into the gang, you had to do something outrageous. So, he was at one of their parties- sitting on a porch of their farm house- and saw a garbage can- he pulled out some rotting meat covered with maggots- and ate several of them. He became a member that day. 🙂
That is the wonder of the market, it will tell you exactly how you are doing. If this were a government operation they would throw more money at it i.e. tax preferences, subsidies, grants or mandate that certain people or organization must use a certain amount of a product they don’t want. Precisely why the government needs to get out of the energy business.
I’ve seen this so many times, I even have a theory for it. Actors play roles written by scriptwriters on topics they know almost nothing about. Whether scriptwriters believe their own bullshit or not, I don’t know. But actors are one step removed, and most movies have just enough veracity for the bullshit to be plausible. So actors believe what is in the script.
When it comes to scripts, that’s shouting at underlings, demanding reports by noon yesterday, and firing lackeys who underperform. None of it shows any of those reports actually being researched and written. None show the 20 years of trial and error or working up the corporate ladders.
Think of how many actors flub such simple things as racking a gun or objecting in a courtroom.
So of course actors think they know everything about everything.
The sales pitch would be that sure, our bug feed is more expensive, but using it, you can say that your product is “climate friendly”, and therefor you can charge more. Because people will pay it.
Sure they will. Uh huh. Riiiiiight.
“Nobody loves me,
Everybody hates me,
Think I’ll go and eat worms…”
Bit of a hard sell.
That’s one of the problems with the left. They are all convinced that they are so smart and that their ideas are so perfect. They never see the need for small scale testing. It’s always straight to full scale.
Be it marketing or politics. It’s all or nothing with them.
They aren’t using their own money so why should they worry about failure?
Note… not one of the usual trollettes is here, saying they eat bugs, worms or cockroaches. 😉
Would it be counted as cannibalism ??
Maybe….I can’t believe its not meat will buy the leftover? Birds love bugs and humans love birds.
They just didn’t market the product to the right animals. This could have been the first step in a poultry superpower, because CHICKENS will eat bugs, and CHICKENS produce both eggs and meat that are suitable for us humans. Want to turn bugs into food? CHICKENS have been doing that for a million years!
Great news and here comes the next idiocy to file “soon” for bankruptcy:
A recently comissioned german hydrogen pipeline with no customers to buy that stuff.
https://blackout-news.de/aktuelles/gascade-nimmt-deutsche-wasserstoff-pipeline-in-betrieb-doch-es-gibt-keinen-einzigen-abnehmer/
The article is in german.
The US film & TV industry emits roughly the same CO₂ as all UK agriculture and waste management combined.
Come back to me when Downey is campaigning for Hollywood to be shutdown.
Lovely grub!
“The fools blew hundreds of millions of dollars on a giant production plant, only to discover their target market didn’t exist.”
Battery Electric Vehicles? Hydrogen production?
Other folks do what they will, here in Texas we eat real food and scrape bugs off the windshield.
Isn’t Beyond Meat close to the same end?