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CFIA approves maggot meal as an animal feed

[Enterra Feed Corp. of B.C. is now selling a novel fly larvae as chicken feed, a move hailed as a victory for sustainability. PHOTO: Enterra Feed]

It’s basically maggot meal but the good news is, it’s not for you.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) has approved farmed fly larvae for use as an animal feed. It’s a first in Canada.

Langley, B.C.-based Enterra Feed Corp. is now selling its novel insect product as chicken feed for broiler chickens, a move hailed as a victory for sustainability.

Yahoo Canada News spoke to Victoria Leung, manager of operations and marketing, about the breakthrough.

Q: What is your product?

A: It’s insect larvae that have been put through a dryer. The moisture has been taken out. It’s just a dried grub basically.

It’s got a nutritional profile that’s has about 40 per cent protein, 40 per cent fat and we sell it as a feed supplement for poultry. The approval that we received from CFIA was specifically for this product to feed to poultry broilers.

From this product we can make other products but the applications are still in review. We can make an oil product out of it and a meal product out of it.

The meal can replace things like fish meal and soybean meal in animal feeds. It can be fed to all sorts of animals – poultry, fish, pets, you name it.

Q: And those are still under review?

The oil hasn’t been applied for yet but the meal we’ve submitted an application so CFIA is taking a look at that now.

Q: Why insect feed?

Because we use recycled food as an input, it’s a sustainable product. We’re not using any additional resources to grow the bugs.

Fish meal, for example, uses wild-caught fish from the ocean. So we’re catching wild fish, we grind it up to make fish meal out of it so it can provide the protein that fish need to grow, fish that we grow for human consumption. We’re talking salmon, trout, that kind of thing.

So we take wild fish out of the ocean to feed our farmed fish. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense and insects can provide a very similar nutritional profile and a lot of the amino acids that are necessary for salmon and trout and other fish species to grow.

As the global population continues to increase there’s going to be more demand for high-quality protein products for human consumption and that puts a lot of pressure on the inputs as well. There’s not going to be that much more fish meal to get from the oceans. We’re going to have to replace it with more sustainable nutrients and that’s what we’re all about.

Soybean meal is another example. It takes a lot of arable land, a lot of nutrients to grow soybeans and then to grind them up and feed them to animals. It would be a lot better if we could use that land and those resources to grow food directly for people.

Q: How do you rear them?

We have a whole farming operation at our facility here in Langley.

We use an insect species called the black soldier fly. It’s a fly in its adult stage but as an adult it doesn’t have any mouth parts, so it doesn’t actually eat in this stage of its life.

All they do [at that stage] is mate and reproduce and then the females lay eggs. They live about five to seven days as an adult fly and then they just naturally die off.

So a female lays eggs. Those eggs hatch into larvae — they’re like little grubs.

When they first hatch, they’re microscopic and it’s in this stage that they consume food nutrients. We’re feeding these larvae every day for two to three weeks until they grow. When they first start out they’re microscopic and by the time they’re ready to turn into adult flies, they’re about the size of the tip of your pinky finger.

We put a small portion of our larvae back into what we call our hatchery, which is where we have all our adult flies mating and producing eggs.

But most of the larvae we harvest right before they become adult flies. At that point they’re most full of protein and fat.

Q: Where do you get the larvae feed?

We use pre-consumer food waste. Anything that comes out of a house or a restaurant or a lunch room – all of that is post-consumer food waste and we don’t accept that material.

Where we get our food waste is grocery stores, food processors, food manufacturers, farms, greenhouses — all along the way before the end consumer makes that purchase.

Q: How much food waste are you using?

On an annual basis, at the capacity that we have year, we can process over 30,000 tonnes of food waste. It’s a lot.

Q: Where are you selling it?

Prior to getting CFIA approval, in Canada we were selling it to pet food companies only because pet food is not regulated by CFIA, so there were no restrictions there.

Now that we do have approval, we’re starting to sell it to broiler poultry feed mills and feed manufacturers.

We’ve also been selling it into the U.S. because the FDA added it earlier this year to their official ingredient list for salmonids — trout, salmon.

We’ve been able to sell it to the poultry market in the U.S. on a state-by-state basis. In the U.S. it works a bit differently. You can get FDA approval for the whole country or you can go state-by-state and work with the departments of agriculture to get your product approved.

Q: How long have you been up and running.

Since 2009. That’s when we really started to get things going.

We ran a demonstration plant in East Vancouver for about a year in 2012-2013. Based on the results, we started building our new facility in Langley in 2014. So we’ve been operational since the end of 2014.

Q: Insect protein is an emerging trend. Your product is not for human consumption but are there possible future human applications?

Our focus has always been on animal feed. The market for animal feed is huge and we feel like that’s the easiest transition.

The market for insects as human feed, particularly in North America and in Europe, is a lot smaller. It’s still a novelty. People are starting to talk about eating crickets and eating other insects but it’s a very small market right now.

For the rest of the world, over two billion people already eat insects as part of their regular diet so we’re not closed off to that idea but it does change the way you run your facility. It’s not our focus right now.

Q: Where did the idea come from?

Really the idea came from David Suzuki. He’s been talking about replacing fish meal in aquaculture diets for a long time because it is such an unsustainable practice.

The idea came from him but all around the world, people are thinking about insect protein more and looking to insects as a sustainable source of nutrients. We’re seeing other companies starting up as well. It’s great to see all the progress.

The interview has been condensed and edited.