Take a shipping container, add a helping of artificial intelligence and a boat-load of black soldier flies, fold in a small mountain of food waste, sprinkle in $16 million of investment led by Balderton Capital, and call in the reviewers. The company uses mini farms that turn expiring fruit and veggies into tasty morsels that can be used as animal feed.
I am an engineer and I left the oil and gas industry. I started a master's degree in sustainable engineering at Cambridge, hoping to get involved with something like this. I thought I would devote my life to something. I would rather do something that can bring change. I participated in a lot of entrepreneurship and sustainable competition that year. I met my co-founder there. Fotis Fotiadis, CEO and co-founder of Better Origin, says that they started working on this five years ago. The purpose and the whole mission of the company has evolved a lot. I believe that our generation will have to solve one of the biggest challenges as we come along, how can we produce food to feed the population in a sustainable and secure way? The global food supply chain is broken because it is not sustainable.
The company says that you can pick any product you want in a supermarket, and there is very little produced locally.
The majority of the seed that gets fed to the chickens comes from South America. You need to ship things over very long distances, which is very damaging for the environment.
It becomes very clear that food supply isn't as resilient as it could be when President Biden suggests that we're facing food shortages due to the Russian invasion in Ukraine. Better Origin thinks it has a part in the solution.
We need a new ingredient to make the food supply chain local. We believe that using food waste is a new ingredient. There are a lot of hidden vitamins and minerals in food waste. Fotiadis says that their technology can take any sort of waste and convert it into food. You feed food waste to insects. You feed the insects to the animals. The systems are in shipping containers, so they can be used in many parts of the supply chain.
The company's premise is to move animal feed production onto the farms that consume the food. Feed consumption costs are reduced and emissions are lowered. The $16 million funding round was led by U.K. veteran investors Balderton Capital. Existing investors also participated.
Better Origin takes local food waste from supermarkets and converts it into high-quality, sustainable animal feed. The conditions found in nature where food is eaten by insects are recreated in its container insect farms. Better Origin uses artificial intelligence and automation to create an optimal environment for this cycle to flourish. The mini-farms are monitored by cameras, computer vision and sensors to make sure they are optimal for production.
In December, Better Origin signed a deal to supply 10 insect mini-farms to feed chickens at Morrisons in the U.K. The company says it is on track to save 5,700 tonnes of CO 2 emissions a year.
Suranga Chandratillake, general partner at Balderton Capital, said that Fotis, Miha, and the Better Origin team are working to fundamentally change our broken food chain for the benefit of everyone. They have shown how farming makes the challenges we face worse and how solutions so far are not leading to the wholesale change we need. Better Origin presents a new approach and we believe it can have a big impact on food and farming systems.
The company currently has five mini-farms up and running, but is planning to grow rapidly over the next year.
Fotiadis suggests that if one thing goes according to plan, they should have 20 ordered in the next couple of months.
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