Marketing and social effects of industrial scale insect value chains in Europe: case of mealworm for feed in France

Abstract

Insects are becoming part of the human diet in many regions of the world, either directly or indirectly, as livestock feed. Insects could become a significant feed ingredient if produced at industrial scale, but it is a challenge. Such an emerging sector would result in substantial social effects. One innovation of the DESIRABLE project is exploring potential social consequences induced by industrial scale development of insect production in France for feed, under several production and marketing assumptions. First, this paper explains how the stakeholders and researchers involved in the project built and selected some framework scenarios, which depict upstream (production and meal processing) scenarios. Downstream scenarios were designed based on interviews with specialists in poultry, trout, and feed production markets, that allowed to proposing plausible scenarios for marketing. The potential outlets are more or less narrow market ‘niches’: feed for laying hens to produce organic eggs, or for farmed trout eating insect meal. Second, the method for evaluating social effects linked with the emergence of the new insect’ industry, a social life cycle analysis in four detailed scenarios. The main positive social effects of the four detailed scenarios result from job creation in the insect production sector, while effects on other feed-ingredient suppliers are few. Negative effects result from the allergy risk for employees and potential disturbance to nearby neighbourhoods, but the latter can be easily managed by carefully choosing the locations. In the two scenarios with integrated bio refinery, exists a major risk that could stop the industrial project: activists could use environmental or animal-welfare concerns to oppose the bio refinery, because of agricultural land and water preservation and/or opposition to industrial scale insect production. Nevertheless, insect meal can help preserve fishery resources by providing a constant substitute for fish meal.

Current scenario in the European edible-insect industry: a preliminary study

“…This trend is probably due to the greater availability of these species and to the management ability acquired by firms, which also employ these species as a feed source. Other reasons for their popularity can be ascribed to their high protein and fat content (Rumpold and Schlüter, 2013) as well as to the fact that some of them are quite easy to rear (Macombe et al, 2019).…”

Acceptability of insects in animal feed: A survey of French consumers

“…Insect meal can help preserve fishery resources by offering an alternative to fishmeal (Macombe, Le Feon, Aubin, & Maillard, 2019; van Huis et al, 2013). The July 2017 amendment to EU regulation 2017/893 authorising the use of insect protein in feed for farmed fish opened the door to new perspectives for the fish‐farming sector.…”

Insect and fish by-products as sustainable alternatives to conventional animal proteins in animal nutrition

“…Feed vs Food -Some issues of neophobia exist when consumers are faced with the direct insect consumption (insects as food) (Sogari et al 2019a). However, they responded positively to the question if they would eat meat products from livestock fed insect meals (insects as feed), when properly informed about current animal feed issues (Verbeke et al 2015;Mancuso et al 2016;Ferrer Llagostera et al 2019;Macombe et al 2019;Sogari et al 2019b). Moreover, in this case, insect-based feeds and animal food from livestock fed with them are considered to have a better nutritional value and to be more sustainable than the conventional feed/food counterparts (Verbeke et al 2015;Ferrer Llagostera et al 2019).…”

“…While there is no evidence of risks related to allergens for humans consuming meat products from livestock fed insect-derived PAPs, allergy risks for the insect-sector' workers mainly due to contact or inhalation have been documented (EFSA 2015; Macombe et al 2019).…”