alt.hn

12/27/2025 at 12:03:56 AM

Ÿnsect, a French insect farming startup, has been been placed into liquidation

 https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/26/how-reality-crushed-ynsect-the-french-startup-that-had-raised-over-600m-for-insect-farming/

by fcpguru

1/1/2026 at 12:01:51 AM

There's an rule in the EU that says you can't feed the insects pork and then let those insects go on to be fed to pigs (same for beef and chicken). This is intended to prevent the transmission of diseases like Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (like "mad cow disease"). As I understand it, this rule isn't because we have shown it's dangerous to do the pig -> insect -> pig chain but rather because we haven't shown that it's safe. Arnold van Huis and his team at Wageningen University are putting quite some energy researching the safety and lobbying the EU to change the rules based on the findings. At one of the talks those folks they said it's basically a black box of trying to get what kind of science the regulators will consider acceptable.

As you might guess, making sure the food waste you feed the insects doesn't have _any_ animal proteins in it is quite logistically challenging and so afaik nobody is doing that at a large scale.

I did quite a bit of research into the history of insects in the food system, especially in the Netherlands. While I was rooting for Ynsect and other big players to figure something good out I believe that it's a problem much better suited to a smaller scale (perhaps on the city level). Basically, have the food waste from various stores brought to a facility to be fed to insects and then let those insects be turned into whatever (pet food, fish food, trendy protein bars).

by raybb

1/1/2026 at 12:46:47 AM

You'd have thought it wouldn't be the proteins in the input, but the prions in the output they would care about. They're remarkably resilient, it's not unreasonable to be cautious.

by regularfry

1/1/2026 at 1:32:51 AM

Agreed, this is one area where care should be taken. The effects of CJD are absolutely horrendous, and it’s easy to imagine that this might be a way to transmit it.

by clickety_clack

1/1/2026 at 11:36:25 AM

Or at least focus on not having neural tissue in the input. That wouldn't rely come from consumer waste, would it?

by anon84873628

1/1/2026 at 6:17:18 PM

plenty if brsins for sale at the supermarket.

but, more important- prions are general. not specific to brain tissue.

by butvacuum

1/1/2026 at 2:28:44 AM

Our city just had a compost program. Throwing away compostable material into the provided bin was free. They put it into the city managed compost yards and then every weekend you could go down there and pick up bags of the finished product to use at home in your garden.

It's also the case that many states already have a "garbage feeding" program that allows food waste to be diverted into feed for commercial animal lots. The food has to meet certain criteria and be fully cooked and ready for human consumption before being discarded.

by themafia

1/1/2026 at 2:10:24 PM

Cooking does not destroy prions to any significant extent. They’re even resistant to autoclaving. It’s one of the big reasons that prion diseases are so pernicious. The garbage feeding you describe could absolutely spread prion diseases for the same reason that use of animal byproducts in feeds spread BSE in Europe.

by mjhay

1/1/2026 at 3:22:38 PM

Wouldn't the worse problem be that humans are consuming it first? These aren't "animal byproducts" it's food meant to be served to humans in restaurants who ended up discarding it.

In any case, it truly is part of several state laws, including where I grew up, in Minnesota. You wouldn't believe what they feed pigs back there. All kinds of expired foods, pastries, candies, and other convenience store fare. That's what the law is meant to cover, including, "discarded or unused restaurant food."

by themafia

1/1/2026 at 3:36:14 PM

Humans consuming it would be bad, but the animal cannibalism is what allows the prion diseases to proliferate in the first place. There never would have been a BSE outbreak in the first place if it weren’t for that.

by mjhay

1/1/2026 at 4:57:59 AM

[dead]

by retr0rocket

1/1/2026 at 12:04:56 PM

Given that the incubation can be in the decades caution is well deserved.

by throwawayffffas

1/1/2026 at 2:40:34 PM

Im not allowed to donate blood in N. America because I once lived in the EU for a few years.

Why?

Because feeding cows cows wasn't proved unsafe and therefore allowed in the food chain. Then people started dying. Oopsie.

But it's OK. It better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

by shtzvhdx

1/1/2026 at 3:39:24 PM

At the time we didn't know prion disease could be transferred between species. There's no evidence that scrapie (sheep prion disease) or CWD (deer and moose prion disease) can be transmitted to other species. BSE is seemingly a unique prion disease that can affect other mammals.

by jrjeksjd8d

1/1/2026 at 9:44:11 AM

> As I understand it, this rule isn't because we have shown it's dangerous to do the pig -> insect -> pig chain but rather because we haven't shown that it's safe.

We banned all kinds of such "forced cannibalism" after BSE, yes. And for good reason, I think - not just is it highly unethical IMHO, but because even a minuscule risk of a repeat of the BSE crisis of the late 90s/early 00s just isn't worth it. The destruction that BSE brought upon the European agriculture industry, the public outrage - I doubt non-Europeans could even understand the impact it had.

by mschuster91

1/1/2026 at 10:20:36 AM

I was born in the UK during BSE, and as a result I can’t give blood in Europe. People forget it but the scars are still there.

by jna_sh

1/1/2026 at 6:38:33 PM

Might want to revisit the regulations of the country you're living in. Ireland [1] and, apparently recently, also Germany [2] at least have largely taken back the ban. If you're fluent in German, you can read the factual basis on which the RKI made its decision here [3].

[1] https://www.giveblood.ie/can-i-give-blood/keeping-blood-safe...

[2] https://www.blutspendedienst-west.de/magazin/blutspende/mehr...

[3] https://www.rki.de/DE/Themen/Infektionskrankheiten/Blut-und-...

by mschuster91

1/1/2026 at 12:47:14 PM

Just to clarify, pig -> insect -> pig wouldn't constitute cannibalism. But it's still a rather unusual (ie low frequency) food chain in nature so there's no reasonable assurance that it will be safe. Given how resilient prions can be and just how crazy some of the observed transmission pathways have been the current EU regulations seem quite sensible to me. (As a layman. To be clear I'm no expert on prion diseases.)

by fc417fc802

1/1/2026 at 2:42:12 PM

Not direct cannibalism. It is cannibalism once removed though.

by shtzvhdx

1/1/2026 at 3:08:09 PM

Soylent Green is people!

by hexfish

1/1/2026 at 1:50:39 AM

Better safe than sorry.

by jacquesm

1/1/2026 at 7:15:07 PM

Scrapie (a sheep and goat prion) contaminates soil where sheep graze (and shit) and can persist for years in the soil.

by m3047

1/1/2026 at 7:06:47 AM

Is pig > insect > cow (and reverse) any safer or have same concerns?

by conductr

1/1/2026 at 10:12:47 AM

Yes, it is safer. Basically what we discovered in the 90s is that cannibalism (an animal eating others of its species) has a relatively high chance of leading to protein mis-folding in that animal, producing prions. Those prions can then cause additional mis-folding producing more prions, this time in a very direct way that is unrelated to who consumes the meat.

So pig > pig or cow > cow is known to produce prions. I believe it's also somewhat proven that, say, pig > cow > pig does not produce prions in the same way. However, insect digestion is very different from vertebrate digestion, so it's not necessarily safe to assume that pig > cow > pig being safe means that pig > insect > pig would also be safe. However, it does prove that pig > insect > cow > pig would still be safe - the insects don't add a risk in themselves, we're just not certain that they eliminate the risk the same way vertebrate digestive systems do.

by tsimionescu

1/1/2026 at 1:04:42 PM

While cannibalism is related to transmission in some cases I don't understand it to have anything to do with prion formation in and of itself. See scrapie for example. While highly contagious the underlying cause of scrapie is typically (afaiu) genetic and transmissible through the environment over fairly long periods of time.

Which is to say that things are likely even a bit worse than you seem to be making out.

by fc417fc802

1/1/2026 at 2:44:37 PM

Its only safer because of dilution - insects are less likely to have proteins that a prion can induce to misfolding.

But unless it is demonstrated that insect digestive systems have some magical enzyme that can do what autoclaves can't, that is break down prions, then it cannot be assumed safe.

by shtzvhdx

1/1/2026 at 12:19:14 PM

Yeah and to be honest the research on it is still at the start. Maybe with the advances in protein folding computational research we'll be able to understand this better

Because that's the biological equivalent of that catastrophic bug that only happens in very weird and very specific conditions

by raverbashing

1/2/2026 at 3:20:20 AM

Are you referring to alphafold etc?

My understanding is they don't actually simulate or calculate (meta)stable states of proteins, but rather extrapolate on known folds of experimentally confirmed proteins (basically peeking at what types of folds are found in similar sequences in other proteins. then known as homologous proteins).

How proteins get folded, unfolded, refolded etc depends on the exact cellular or vacuolar environment.

AlphaFold isn't trained on the environment, it only sees the known mappings from genetic sequence to protein structure. It is patently unaware of any environmental aid or frustration in correctly folding a protein.

An incorrectly folded protein structure (putative prion structure) and its correctly folded structure share the same genetic sequence. AlphaFold is effectively blind, it was just trained on correctly folded proteins with known structure.

Unless future versions of alphafold use ML to speed up actual QM or molecular modelling calculations

I don't see how alphafold can help enumerate all potential misfolds of all proteins generated or preserved in an animal of species A and consumed in an animal of species B, and calculate all possible ways a misfolded protein from A may act as a prion in B.

by DoctorOetker

1/1/2026 at 8:31:42 AM

As far as I understand, it is indeed safer, because different animals tend to be sensitive to different illnesses.

by pif

1/1/2026 at 10:34:11 AM

I had heard about that rule. But thought I had heard it had been overruled in the last 5-10 years. Maybe only for fishing feeding cycles?

by Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe

1/1/2026 at 8:33:25 AM

> food waste from various stores brought to a facility to be fed to insects

a. how does that solve the transmission problem?

b. amazing work by EU bureaucrats to regulate businesses that dont exist yet

c. they can export the feed to fish farms or china or whatever. the question is do the economics work. US soy bean is just incredibly productive (and subsidized)

by algo_trader

1/1/2026 at 1:06:00 AM

> But don’t be too quick to attribute its failure to the “ick” factor that many > Westerners feel about bugs.

I think this is a weird wording. I dont think you need to limit the ick factor to "Westerners" There are an awful lot of people out there who would feel the "ick" factor.

And even for some of those who do eat insects, they are specific insects, form specific places, prepared in traditional ways.

Not a powder of insects

by ThinkBeat

1/1/2026 at 9:18:16 AM

> I think this is a weird wording. I dont think you need to limit the ick factor to "Westerners" There are an awful lot of people out there who would feel the "ick" factor.

Of course, this has nothing to do with “Westerners.” No one in their right mind would want farm animals to be fed insect powder. The fact that the company was allowed to operate and to receive massive funding is the real issue here.

by Hoasi

1/1/2026 at 10:33:22 AM

Well, chickens tend to live off insects when you let them roam.

I don't really see how insect powder would be worse than the flour they get now. You don't even need to turn the bugs into a powder.

by 317070

1/1/2026 at 2:46:27 PM

To be fair, chickens can see and discriminate between insects before putting them in their mouths. Powdered insects preclude that.

Likewise, cows would never eat a carcass cow, but as hamburger mixed with a lot of grass...

by shtzvhdx

1/1/2026 at 4:08:16 PM

> To be fair, chickens can see (insects)

Yes, they do that

> and discriminate between insects

Yeah, they do not do that.

They also eat mice, which I guess came as quite a surprise to the cat that was stalking the mouse, although not half as much as to the mouse.

by ErroneousBosh

1/1/2026 at 1:07:07 PM

Indeed we already feed them insects and we don't powder them. You can purchase bags of dried meal worms at the feed store. The carcasses are fully intact.

by fc417fc802

1/1/2026 at 10:02:05 AM

> No one in their right mind would want farm animals to be fed insect powder.

Why?

by its-summertime

1/1/2026 at 4:08:59 PM

There aren't really any farm animals that eat insects. Mostly they eat tough grasses and plants, the kind of things that we can't eat.

by ErroneousBosh

1/1/2026 at 11:55:43 AM

I am pretty sure most people don't care how their steak made it's on their table.

by Yokohiii

1/1/2026 at 2:48:25 PM

I think most people do care if it weren't very difficult, even illegal, to find out.

by shtzvhdx

1/1/2026 at 3:56:39 PM

There's a famous video of a bunch of kids seeing the nasty, vile process of creating chicken nuggets in front of them. At the end of the nasty process, the chicken nuggets are made and presented in front of the kids. After asking, "Who wants chicken nuggets?" all hands go up instantly.

No, actually showing how the sausage is made does NOT stop people from wanting it. I honestly think that people like knowing how fake/cruel things are! People want the comically fake look and taste. See Mar-a-Lago face and its popularity. Hopefully AI or something can "engineer the human spirit" away from this horrible tendency.

Related, Asians seem to love to take westerners absolute worst food and act like it's okay despite being absolute "food divas" otherwise. Asians (in their own countries) will unironically eat kraft singles on their ramen and use spam everywhere, while simultaneously gloating that "they only go out to eat for food that's hard to make at home" and lamenting about how disgusting fast food is.

You won't win anything by trying to show people how gross food is. You think bugs are gross to people? Remember fear factor?

by Der_Einzige

1/1/2026 at 4:56:12 PM

Thats was Jamie Oliver, right?

I really don't concede the point. Kids see food they aren't accustomed to eating blended together and fed to them by people they trust (Oliver is a celebrity in the UK).

What they aren't seeing is the chicken eggs they're eating was laid by a hen that was shat on by the chicken above it while sitting on a bed made of the cadaver of the chicken that held the pen before it.

by shtzvhdx

1/1/2026 at 4:12:30 PM

Steak is the meat that people pay the most attention to in this regard! People will pay hundreds of dollars for a few ounces of steak solely based on how the cow was raised and fed.

For steak, I disagree with the article about stigma of eating bugs. Feeding cows bugs will save money, no doubt, and that might help cost on the low end of the beef market. Steak is a different thing though. A "bug-raised, bug-finished" steak would have to be incredible to overcome the stigma.

by trimbo

1/1/2026 at 4:40:36 PM

There are probably a fair share of people that care. But I said "most" and stand by it. Maybe you are american? Around here we don't ask how the cattle was fed, maybe in high end restaurants and markets, but that is obviously a minority.

by Yokohiii

1/1/2026 at 10:54:41 AM

For the longest time industrial and domestic livestock raising used to involve feed that included literally anything the animal would it. Free range birds today regularly eat worms and insects. Pigs were used as a sort of waste disposal system for anything they could digest, leading to a lot of health issues. Still nobody really cared beyond “I’ll cook it until it doesn’t kill me”, not the producers, not the consumers.

by close04

12/31/2025 at 10:35:23 PM

>The fact that Ÿnsect failed doesn’t mean the entire insect farming sector is doomed. Competitor Innovafeed is reportedly holding up better, in part because it started with a smaller production site and is ramping up incrementally.

>For Prof. Haslam, Ÿnsect exemplifies a broader European problem. “Ÿnsect is a case study in Europe’s scaling gap. We fund moonshots. We underfund factories. We celebrate pilots. We abandon industrialization. See Northvolt [a struggling Swedish battery maker], Volocopter [a German air taxi startup], and Lilium [a failed German flying taxi company],” he said.

by dmos62

1/1/2026 at 7:36:48 AM

For the moment ynsect was launched in France it was obvious that it was doomed to fail. Like often here, the only real goal was to suck public funding.

Normally, you would start a small business/factory and scale with your business. Especially growing insect doesn't require a "mega factory".

But here, from the onset, they started from scratch and announced a mega investment to build a giant factory. Obviously getting hundreds of millions or even a billion, most from public funding as we could guess.

by greatgib

1/1/2026 at 5:06:29 PM

Where can I learn more about that ?

by cassepipe

1/1/2026 at 7:41:00 PM

It was in French and a long time ago, but basically it was in the style of the following article:

https://www.fishfarmingexpert.com/france-mealworm-molitors/n...

Like the huge megalomaniac project that, to french people, is the typical example of too huge to make sense step for a startup, that is expected to be a sink of funds.

Otherwise, there is a good article in english if you want straight to the point article about the history and concret reasons of failure in the following link:

https://www.onei-insectes.org/en/ynsect-difficultes-economiq...

by greatgib

12/31/2025 at 10:44:25 PM

I think in the case of flying taxi's is just that it is a moronic idea tho.

by polytely

12/31/2025 at 10:52:01 PM

Flying taxis make a lot of sense for very specific areas (e.g. Manhattan) and applications (e.g. mountain rescue).

by xnx

12/31/2025 at 11:28:10 PM

Ain’t no way you want flying taxis in Manhattan. If two collide or one fails, you could kill dozens of people.

Maaaaybe instead of the tunnels and bridges, to increase throughput during rush hours, but even then we’re trying to have fewer vehicles in Manhattan, not more.

Also, I cannot imagine what it would be like to go through an intersection during the winter. You would be hit with a wall of cross-cutting wind tunneling down 50 blocks that no airborne device is going to handle well. Absolute nightmare.

by tyre

1/1/2026 at 12:11:55 AM

Right. This wouldn't be point to point on the Manhattan grid, but from Manhattan Island back and forth to the airports.

by xnx

1/1/2026 at 12:46:57 AM

Helicopter. Already exists.

by edoceo

1/1/2026 at 2:52:35 PM

Helicopters have a significant safety problem.

https://stopthechopnynj.org/safety-and-terrorism/?utm_source...

by kevin_thibedeau

1/1/2026 at 7:50:13 PM

More people are killed in motor vehicle accidents in a single month in NY than in all of the incidents listed on that page spanning 58 years.

by rounce

1/2/2026 at 2:43:34 AM

I like the terrorism section here, which lists zero terrorist attacks (because there haven’t been any) and loads of supposed risks…

And yet!

by tyre

1/1/2026 at 12:54:34 PM

Drone like flying vehicles are much safer and cheaper than helicopters. Or will be at least.

by rapsey

1/1/2026 at 8:57:10 PM

I don't really agree with that. Helicopters can auto-rotate, drones can't. If something goes wrong with a drone system, it is going to crash hard guaranteed and likely doesn't have any meaningful control on the way down.

by AngryData

1/1/2026 at 4:13:02 PM

How will they be?

Literally any failure of the aircraft means you die.

by ErroneousBosh

1/1/2026 at 5:53:33 PM

No they have multiple engines and can survive failures.

by rapsey

1/1/2026 at 4:52:50 AM

Well yeah, it would be like a cheap helicopter you can rent. What is so bad about that.

by s1artibartfast

1/1/2026 at 6:16:16 AM

"Cheap" and "Helicopter"

That's where the problem is.

by MadnessASAP

1/1/2026 at 6:59:50 AM

It's certainly not crazy to imagine that you could cut the costs of a helicopter-like aircraft that was purpose-made for relatively short, relatively low-speed, relatively light load duties.

by aetherson

1/1/2026 at 7:05:16 AM

The energy cost during operations is very relevant, too, which is why you see things like tilt rotor designs with wings/bodies to generate lift.

When Airbus was doing the math on these a few years ago, the pilot cost was also one of the main concerns, so it was "autonomous or bust", and they ended up investing a lot on the autonomous side (not just the aircraft but also urban traffic management, etc).

by rkomorn

1/1/2026 at 1:11:13 PM

> If two collide or one fails, you could kill dozens of people.

How is that any different from an automobile navigating the ridiculously crowded streets?

by fc417fc802

1/1/2026 at 2:51:34 PM

Presumably, if you're going to bother with flying vehicles, it's to free up space on the ground below.

To fill with other uses, say pedestrians.

Taxi falls, pedestrians get crushed bellow, but now the vehicular speed isn't 20-30 mph tops, but the terminal velocity of the vehicle.

mv^2 is mean.

by shtzvhdx

1/1/2026 at 1:25:51 PM

Much worse, obviously.

by DonHopkins

1/1/2026 at 1:38:05 PM

That's not at all obvious to me. Please explain. Both are approximately car sized and both are likely to hit pedestrians.

In a place with fewer pedestrians I'd buy that airborne vehicles might have a higher chance of hitting a person because they could crash somewhere that a traditional taxi couldn't. But when the place is packed wall to wall with people an arms length away I don't think that applies anymore. At least it doesn't seem self evident to me.

by fc417fc802

1/1/2026 at 2:43:40 PM

Consider that not all malfunctions of a car leads it to crashing into things. The fuel system, the engine, the transmission and even the steering can completely break down and the car will still came to a stop. They are equipped with redundant brakes, and are always supported by the ground.

At the same time an aircraft is much more precarious. If anything in the fuel, engine, transmission, props, or control surfaces go wrong it will come down and fast. They have much more potential energy than a car (because they are high up). They also typically have much more kinetic energy because they have to move faster to maintain lift if they are fixed winged, or they have to have fast rotating parts if they are rotary winged.

by krisoft

1/1/2026 at 3:16:29 PM

In crowded streets cars obviously go slow, and in any case most traffic accidents don't result in a car starting accelerating uncontrollably until it runs into a building.

Even a 20 m flight height means the taxi will reach 72 km/h before it hits the ground.

by SiempreViernes

1/1/2026 at 4:12:25 PM

> Both are approximately car sized and both are likely to hit pedestrians.

Would you rather be hit by Skoda Octavia travelling at around 20mph out of control, or a "flying taxi" travelling at 110mph out of control?

Because that's how fast it would be travelling when it fell on you.

by ErroneousBosh

12/31/2025 at 11:22:44 PM

I’m not an expert by any means, but one of the major impediments I would imagine to flying taxis carrying people is safety; there’s a _lot_ that has to be done before people board an airplane in terms of checks, paperwork, planning, etc.

The dream of “order a flying taxi on your phone and it takes you wherever you want in five minutes” isn’t really compatible with aviation safety culture (at least at the pilot level in the US). That’s not to say it can’t be done, but you probably need a lot of really good PR people to figure out how to say “we want to remove the safety controls from this so we can make money with it” and have people buy it.

by exsomet

1/1/2026 at 12:51:32 AM

aviation occupies a great deal of my attention, and there is a logic to everything that is done, based on actual provable, repeatable results. anything involved in high volume passenger aviation has to pass reliability tests that will dry your eyes out just reading through the synopsis, nothing is making it to the PR stage. I splain little bit, pick some fancy country full of rich people flying around, tell them that the US has just ripped the lid off airspace restrictions (again¹), and is now letting some kind of ubber drone thing loose , and quite litteraly instantly there will be calls for all flights going to the US to turn around as all insurance policys for commercial flights to the US will be null and void.

¹one of the few times the US has been forced to back down admit fault, and agree to changes. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/12/17/united...

by metalman

1/1/2026 at 12:28:56 AM

i don't think mountain rescue is asking for a better vehicle. traditional helicopters work.

flying taxi startups, drone companies, jetpack companies, and all the other fantastical flying startyps keep trying to say they have applications in mountain rescue, but i'm pretty sure that's providing a lot more benefit to the flying taxi startup's pitch deck than it is to any mountain rescue operation.

by notatoad

1/1/2026 at 8:20:23 AM

Traditional helicopters also have the effective lift-weight ratios to tackle the density*altitude of mountain rescue that these "air-taxis" have _zero_ hope to achieve with the the vastly lower power-weight of electrical drive-trains and their lift-inefficient multi-rotor designs.

by calmbonsai

12/31/2025 at 10:55:48 PM

China calls it the low-altitude economy, and besides human transportation there is a lot that can be done. Personally, I believe that propeller-driven devices are too dangerous and noisy, but there might be innovations coming out of China that Europe can't

by ph4rsikal

12/31/2025 at 11:54:59 PM

Everything that flies is driven with a loud dangerous spinning thing (propeller)

by bethekidyouwant

1/1/2026 at 7:35:39 AM

Birds.

by nandomrumber

1/1/2026 at 10:18:59 AM

Bird flight doesn't scale significantly. You can deliver very small objects via bird, and perhaps build a bird-like drone that does the same. But you can't build a human-carrying bird.

by tsimionescu

1/1/2026 at 1:17:10 PM

We haven't figured out how to scale it _yet_.

by fc417fc802

1/1/2026 at 1:39:18 PM

It's very possible, and in fact most likely, that it can't scale. Insect flight is an even better example - the mechanisms that allow most insects to fly simply don't work past a few grams of weight. So, it is simply impossible to create an insect-like drone that can carry a human.

I expect the exact same is true for birds - the kinds of effects that allow birds to fly with so little energy compared to a propeller-based aircraft are almost certainly not scalable, due to the fundamental properties of air as a gas. As far as I know, bird flight is made possible by complex turbulence effects induced by the microscopic structure of their feathers. It's very unlikely this effect could skale to 100kg of weight.

by tsimionescu

1/1/2026 at 2:33:23 PM

Could work for delivering high-value low-weight items, like illicit drugs. Not much else.

by meindnoch

12/31/2025 at 11:11:43 PM

What attribute should they have to make them more suited than helicopters? Silence ? Energy efficiency ? No landing pad ?

by aziaziazi

12/31/2025 at 11:31:03 PM

Lower noise, lower operating cost, lower purchase price, easier to pilot, more reliable (fewer parts), safer (redundancy), no emissions, faster time to air, configurable to requirements, etc.

by xnx

1/1/2026 at 2:18:56 AM

Yes, I too want my space alien anti-gravity flying saucer. Those eggheads need to hurry it up.

by rpcope1

1/1/2026 at 4:10:37 PM

They make no sense at all.

You can't fly within 500 feet of any person, vehicle, or structure.

At 500 feet, literally any failure of the aircraft means you die about seven seconds later.

by ErroneousBosh

1/1/2026 at 2:15:18 AM

> any kind of outdoor rescue

You know we have these things called "helicopters", right?

by rpcope1

1/1/2026 at 5:45:46 AM

We also had carriages before cars. What’s the deal of so many “X already exists therefore any replacement is pointless” posts?

by signatoremo

1/1/2026 at 6:50:38 AM

Because the need is fulfilled adequately. They are not solving anything new or revolutionising anything old, these are dumb ideas for dumb people to throw money at hoping it sticks.

by stoneforger

1/1/2026 at 1:25:27 PM

> the need is fulfilled adequately

It is not. Wilderness rescues are extremely resource constrained due to the costs involved coupled with the fact that those in need of rescue were fully aware of the risks before they set out. There's a severe limit to how many tax dollars will go towards bailing adults out of situations of their own making. Lowering costs would quite literally save lives.

by fc417fc802

1/1/2026 at 7:18:58 AM

Is it?

Are we ­— as a species — really going to spend until eternity grovelling around on the ground?

If not, then we need personal aircraft.

by ta20240528

1/1/2026 at 7:37:54 AM

What is there to do not-on-the-ground?

Other than wait to be on the ground again?

by nandomrumber

1/1/2026 at 12:19:49 PM

Unless you figure out a way to turn off this pesky thing called gravity: yes.

Even birds spend the majority of their times on the ground.

by well_ackshually

1/1/2026 at 10:51:37 AM

Then get a PPL

by rounce

1/1/2026 at 8:25:33 AM

At least with respect to aviation, we don't have any non-combustion power-trains that can remotely come close to the power-to-weight ratios of turbine engines.

The earliest cars were replacing the animal muscle power of carriages--a trivially easy feat given that the most primitive steam and combustion engines easily 10x both the raw power, power-to-weight, and power-density of a team of horses.

by calmbonsai

1/1/2026 at 1:12:42 AM

> Flying taxis make a lot of sense for very specific areas (e.g. Manhattan)

The things people will do to not build bike paths.

by andrepd

1/1/2026 at 3:21:54 AM

Unfortunately Manhattan doesn't seem like a great place for bikes. The weather is just too variable. Some daredevils will be out in any weather but for most people it's just not feasible about half of the days of the year.

Not that helicopters make any more sense. The city needs some car bans, and yes, bicycles are part of replacing that. But only mass transit will be able to move enough people when there's a foot of slush on the ground.

by jfengel

1/1/2026 at 10:17:39 AM

Weather in New York is perfectly fine for biking. If you can walk outside you can bike. Both means of transportation are equally resilient to bad weather. What you need is protected bike lanes, so you can bike relaxed and holding an umbrella if necessary, as millions of people do every day in Netherlands and other European countries.

by tirant

1/1/2026 at 3:40:45 AM

...ChatGPT? Such an odd take, to point at weather being variable.

This is a coastal city at a fairly run-of-the-mill latitude, people build functional bike networks in much worse.

by medstrom

1/1/2026 at 8:33:06 AM

I'll point you to my prior comment re:bike-commuting in D.C. versus the same in Boulder, Colorado. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46367940

There needs to be an entire wholesale change in both infrastructure and culture to make bike-commuting workable in most extant cities.

Relatively speaking, the infrastructure is the easy part.

I think we'll get to the heat death of the universe before bike-commuting in Houston, Texas would ever be "a thing".

by calmbonsai

1/1/2026 at 7:16:28 AM

Agree. It doesn’t have the futuristic vibe but an urban gondola type system is probably what would be best. Especially in a city where there may already be a network of structures to leverage (eg. The buildings/rooftops and elevators). It would require massive coordination or eminent domain type laws to force but end result could be pretty awesome

by conductr

12/31/2025 at 11:10:16 PM

What is moronic about the idea?

by jstummbillig

12/31/2025 at 11:22:47 PM

It's hard to pick just one reason, but off the top of my head:

* Any failure tends to turn flying things into unguided missiles

* Noise is extremely hard to control -- I did an FAA helicopter discovery lesson, and oof

* Cities tend to have difficult to manage wind currents and hit-or-miss visibility. I was in a skyscraper across from one hit by a helicopter trying and failing to land in 2019 -- there's reasons for city no-fly zones

* Limited landing sites makes them highly situational in the first place, unless you want your streets to be helipads, which you don't

These are all fairly intrinsic and not mitigable. I can think of more issues more in the sticks, but you get the idea.

by i80and

1/1/2026 at 6:32:08 AM

There are about 80,000 non-essential helicopter flights in Manhattan annually -[0]. That means a) there is a lot of demand, and b) it’s been pretty safe, with accidents being very rare.

Many people are against helicopters on the grounds of noise, safety and pollution. Electric taxis will be welcomed once they are certified and economical. They only need to do better than helicopters.

[0] - https://stopthechopnynj.org/frequently-asked-questions/

by signatoremo

1/1/2026 at 12:22:25 PM

> Electric taxis will be welcomed once they are certified and economical.

Do you believe helicopters are noisy because they're not electric ? Your electric taxi will do the same thing: they need propellers. Propellers that can carry up to 1 ton are fucking loud.

Electric taxis will never be welcomed because they are a dumb idea.

by well_ackshually

12/31/2025 at 11:32:10 PM

The wind in NYC is no joke. In brooklyn yesterday there were gusts so strong that car alarms were going off. In some apartment buildings, the handicap-accessible automatic doors simply cannot open into the wind.

Imagine being in a flying car. Nope nope nope!

by tyre

12/31/2025 at 11:37:49 PM

One more reason is that it cannot actually solve the traffic problem that it claims to solve. It might be able to solve it for rich people when they are the only ones that can afford to travel by air, but if the cost ever comes down low enough for the masses to afford it, I don’t see any reason that congestion wouldn’t be as bad or worse than it is now. And to me it’s not a good investment to improve things just for rich people.

by pastel8739

1/1/2026 at 12:46:56 AM

There’s just a lot more space when you can move in three dimensions, so I don’t think the congestion limitations of non-flying cars are likely to be replicated. IIUC (I’m no expert) that’s one of the most attractive features of flying VTOL vehicles.

by leoc

1/1/2026 at 1:23:13 AM

You're bandwidth-limited on a sparse serialized landing site map no matter what, and you need far higher distance margins that will eat up basically all of the dimensional advantages.

If ground vehicles side-swipe, it's just an insurance claim. If flying vehicles sideswipe, it's a Problem(tm).

by i80and

1/1/2026 at 3:59:43 AM

I honestly think the most attractive features of VTOL vehicles are that they are from sci fi, and you can look up and see a bunch of empty space and wish you were there while sitting in traffic.

by pastel8739

12/31/2025 at 11:44:42 PM

I am (usually) not willing to assume that the founders of highly technical startups would not consider something that I as an outsider would in the first 5 minutes of engaging with the topic.

That makes me skeptical of all of these (minus the wind currents in cities, that might have taken a little longer).

by jstummbillig

1/1/2026 at 12:10:04 AM

Founders can be chasing a dream and in doing so mesmerize investors. Or they capitalize on that same dream being the investor's. Even if it's not viable, it can still be really fun company to work for and/or earn money at. Even if there is a small lane for that sort of flying machine, the sheer number of companies purportedly working on something like that is suspect. Given the huge costs for development and certification, and the small number of vehicles that will really get deployed (certainly for the first so many years), there must be many that are never going to make their money back. I worked for a drone-adjacent company and now my LinkedIn is swamped with these startups.

by sverhagen

1/1/2026 at 8:21:18 PM

I don't approach it from this angle.

Here's my sanity check when reading something like this on hn: What do you have me believe about the founder/investors? I understand that it's fun and common around here to be arrogant enough to presume that other people are absolute idiots, who are incredibly bad at their jobs, but I am not interested. If all you can bring are "duh" ideas, then that's a red flag.

Unless you can bring really insightful ideas, I am going to err on the side of the people who put years of their time into it and the people who put millions of dollars into it

Are they still going to be wrong? Of course. Am I likely to think the sidechair hn commentator is simply missing something in the bigger picture? Yes (and I can think of multiple concrete things in this case)

by jstummbillig

1/1/2026 at 1:32:53 AM

If a startup were able to truly solve the first two issues alone, they would not be burning those world-changing engineering solutions on flying taxis.

I don't know if a silent, fail-safe, and efficient method of flight is physically impossible or not, but I do know this is low on the list of applications it would be first seen in.

EDIT: I'm looking at the air taxi companies this thread started with, and no, they have not solved any of the relevant problems.

by i80and

12/31/2025 at 11:52:35 PM

Theranos was famously founded on pitches about blood testing from finger pricks that literally any phlebotomist and many people with a modest life science background could've told you were physically and statistically impossible on their face. You should be considerably less credulous toward startup grifters.

by RodgerTheGreat

1/1/2026 at 12:14:13 AM

The reason why you (and everyone else) knows about Theranos is that it was unique, which serves as a bad signifier if you want to judge what is likely to happen with the next startup. Being in prison and losing billions of dollars is just not something most people get excited about.

by jstummbillig

1/1/2026 at 12:26:41 AM

The reason we know about Theranos is that it ended up in court. Plenty of other startups have had obviously impractical ideas that didn't go anywhere.

by cbzbc

1/1/2026 at 10:30:05 AM

The reason we know about Theranos is because they took the grift up to a huge level and went from grift to outright fraud once they had to show actual results.

It is not only not unique, but in fact extremely common for startups to be grifts around impossible technical promises, live a few years off gullible investors who have way more money than sens and/or for whom losing a few million dollars on a long shot is just as bad as me wasting a few dollars on a gizmo off Temu I know probably won't work, and which then die out because their ideas obviously couldn't work.

They even sometimes find a niche by pivoting to some vaguely related tech. Say, while flying taxis obviously won't work, a startup trying to build them might find itself developing into a small company building helicopter propeller blades for some specific niche.

by tsimionescu

12/31/2025 at 10:47:29 PM

Because noise?

by ericd

1/1/2026 at 12:22:08 AM

Startups failed, now here's bob with the weather.

by Fnoord

1/1/2026 at 7:09:57 AM

It’s moronic to have the government pick winners. Only private investors with actual skin in the game will pick those with true potential. This error happens again and again and again

by monero-xmr

1/1/2026 at 9:13:27 AM

See SpaceX, Oracle etc for more government funded winners

by jimnotgym

1/1/2026 at 4:54:02 AM

No monorail on the list?

How about funding some housing for the people? Why is it that every city had new huge neighbourhoods built en-masse until the 1990s, and then suddenly stopped (with a few tiny exceptions)?

But hey, flying taxis, right?

by ajsnigrutin

1/1/2026 at 8:10:12 AM

Similar like grass fed beef and dairy is a sign of quality and "naturality". I look forward to the day when insect fed chicken becomes a sign of quality. Because insects are part of a natural diet for chickens.

by arnejenssen

1/1/2026 at 7:02:09 PM

> Because insects are part of a natural diet for chickens.

It's actually a welfare issue for chickens. They have feathers, and they molt. Just like hair, feathers need methionine. Methionine is very hard to get solely from plant sources. If they don't get enough methionine they eat each other's feathers, not just the discarded feathers (which left on their own they do normally).

by m3047

1/1/2026 at 8:35:09 AM

If the insects are fed "naturally", though!

by pif

1/1/2026 at 12:10:06 PM

If the insects are fed naturally, it would probably be more cost effective to feed the chickens whatever you are feeding the insects. The only reason to introduce the insects would be if you were using something the chicken cannot eat, like wood.

by throwawayffffas

1/1/2026 at 12:46:25 PM

Living organisms don't metabolise and transform matter in the same way.

A chicken eating an insect who ate a plant could produce higher quality feed and thus chicken than if the chicken ate the plant directly.

by LunaSea

1/1/2026 at 12:33:04 PM

Same with humans. It's much more efficient to feed humans directly than animals for human consumption.

by amunozo

1/1/2026 at 8:47:22 AM

Reminds me there are startups looking at vat grown protein using hydrogen and CO2 to feed nitrogen fixing bacteria.

An interesting thing is solar farms are maybe 30-50 times more efficient than corn. So the above isn't insane on the face of it.

by Gibbon1

1/1/2026 at 8:05:38 AM

"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. "

if you raise that much money and go under, its usually just fraud.

by max_

1/1/2026 at 9:04:08 AM

The french government has been heavily subsidizing private R&D (up to 50% of the cost, including engineer salaries). It was relatively easy to create a moonshot project worth a few millions, and have the taxpayer pay for half of it. Then you just need to find a sucker to pay for the other half, and collect the money (getting an actual result is optional).

How do I know? My company is a minority partner in one such project (wind energy, we would provide instrumentation). It's infuriating, the head company has been trying to make one of the big energy providers pay for half the R&D, with no success, and the project will be closed. Lots of taxpayer money wasted for no result, and we won't make sales.

Because of these abuses, the french government is changing the financing rules. They will only finance small proof of concepts first, then a pilot project, and only then industrialisation issues (instead of financing all in one go).

by lefra

1/1/2026 at 4:05:55 PM

IMO it doesn't make any sense for a startup company like this to get $600 million in funding before making a profit. It seems obvious that it could be proved out for a lot less before scaling up.

by jlarocco

1/1/2026 at 5:01:34 AM

This is like Juicero. It doesn't need a startup, investors or "tech". They already do this all over the world, and not just for animal feed...

It's not that it's not a good idea, it's already there. It's that it's not a VC idea.

And it seems the market prooved my point

by iancmceachern

1/1/2026 at 6:11:23 AM

Why do you think it’s not a VC idea? VC is necessary to scale up to large volume. It’s easy for me to believe that insect protein can be a good business at high volume but not low. At volume you can get economies of scale and efficiency and get your cost basis down, making things profitable that wouldn’t be profitable at lower volume. Makes sense on fundamentals without a lot of details. Sounds like they were just too ambitious and chased after a very large market with very thin margins. (Animal feed.) instead of a smaller market with thicker margins (pet food)

The fact that they were simultaneously pursuing animal, pet, and human product lines is just poor management. Exactly the kind of poor management that VC can encourage, mind you. Because VC pumps in tons of money and wants to see big plans.

by oofbey

1/1/2026 at 9:04:09 AM

For the same reason corn farming isn't.

They already do this, at scale, feeding people, all over the world. There is no "unlock" to invent some tech that makes it magically more efficient, cheaper, or otherwise more adoptable.

The only difference between them and their existing, already on the market competition is they don't owe investors 10x returns.

by iancmceachern

1/1/2026 at 7:52:14 PM

Good point there isn’t some magic unlock. Although maybe they were hoping to find one.

But a key difference with corn is that corn has been farmed for thousands of years. We know without a doubt there aren’t any low hanging fruit to make it more efficient. I think it’s a reasonable bet that insect farming might have some easy wins simply because (almost) nobody has tried it at scale before.

by oofbey

1/1/2026 at 4:32:25 PM

Pet food might be more lucrative. Or fish food.

But it is not a goldmine. Dogs, cats etc have better teeth and like to eat a lot of meat, that humans generally does not eat: rabbit ears, tendons, throats, noses, etc.

Insect food is not that cheap. A lot of pet stores give out free treat samples. My dog normally loves all treats, but refuses to eat the the insect treats (before I realize they are made from insects).

I am sure there are companies making a good living making insect pet food. But it is probably not that obvious a choice.

by nelgaard

1/1/2026 at 10:20:43 AM

Good. We do not need to bring even more animal suffering into this world. Especially when we have much better alternatives available to us.

by CWIZO

1/1/2026 at 9:41:54 AM

Meanwhile the "other" French insect farming startup seems to be doing fine (Innovafeed)

by yujzgzc

1/1/2026 at 1:42:42 PM

They should stick to snails.

by DonHopkins

1/1/2026 at 6:51:02 AM

Given that EU tech salaries are a lot more tame, it would be interesting to see how 600m were even used. Hopefully there’s some good R&D there and not some French alps retreats and Porches for founders

by boguscoder

1/1/2026 at 6:58:55 AM

They had 600 million employees!?

by MarcelOlsz

1/1/2026 at 12:25:38 PM

Yes. All of Europe was working for them, and we're now entirely jobless. The industries, governments, all refocused on insects, and now it's gone. We don't know what to do. Send help.

by well_ackshually

1/1/2026 at 8:25:13 AM

> how a startup can go bankrupt despite raising over $600 million

by wiether

1/1/2026 at 1:14:46 AM

I'm letting my mind wander and thinking what a French insect wrangler looks like. I'm kind of imagining a mix between French style, a cowboy hat, and lab gear.

by davidw

1/1/2026 at 3:52:53 AM

Or maybe a guy with a large incredibly smelly cheese who is trailed by a huge cloud of flies.

by chihuahua

1/1/2026 at 11:37:05 AM

I find it remarkable, and depressing, that so many people just cannot handle the idea of insect protein. You get similar resistance to water reclamation from sewage and nuclear power. How are we supposed to change the world when we always hamstrung by all the mercurial and irrational whining?

by adamwong246

1/1/2026 at 10:31:46 AM

The monster in Paris should not fear getting meat packed anymore!

by tossandthrow

1/1/2026 at 8:57:10 AM

“Make something people want” was supposed to be the motto.

by Hoasi

1/1/2026 at 8:35:06 AM

No Flea Soup for You!

by dostick

1/1/2026 at 9:16:06 AM

> Ÿnsect, a French insect farming startup, has been been placed into liquidation

Yum, liquidised insects

by jimnotgym

1/1/2026 at 7:24:53 PM

I wonder if they would have succeeded if they didn't try to go so big so fast.

Another thing would have been if they had worked with Black Soldier Flies and focused on sourcing feedstock for them and scaling in a cheaper manner -- cheap/modular bins that leverage their tendency to "self harvest" -- the BSF larvae will climb up a ramp when ready and drop right into a collection bucket.

Automating the care and feeding of those pods in a cost-conscious manner and then being able to package that facility at scale at the feedstock source, e.g., parking shipping containers at a dairy farm where they're happy to consume the livestock waste. Then collect and bring back to a central processing facility.

by pstuart

1/1/2026 at 4:25:52 PM

Until the vegans make it mandatory through legislation, nobody is going to eat bugs.

by MagicMoonlight

1/1/2026 at 7:02:27 PM

1. Most vegans don’t intentionally eats bugs.

2. Ynsect main target was… non-human animal food.

by aziaziazi

1/1/2026 at 8:14:00 PM

Why would vegans eat bugs or force others to eat bugs, though?

by alpyn

12/31/2025 at 10:36:29 PM

Ynsect-crushing reality - nobody really wants to eat bugs

by zerofor_conduct

12/31/2025 at 10:41:57 PM

“Human food was never the focus”

I eagerly purchase insect/grub kibble for my dog - both fly and cricket based. Also a lot of vegetarian kibble, I am a vegetarian myself.

by dieselgate

1/1/2026 at 12:26:26 AM

But still your dog doesn't really want to eat the bugs, it's just there's no bowl of steak next to it

by aguacaterojo

1/1/2026 at 9:01:30 PM

How can you know that? Dogs were domesticated on being fed scraps to start with and came from wolves which are also natural scavengers and eat all sorts of nasty (to us) things. Ive seen many dogs happily gobble up insects, even stink bugs. Dogs don't even know what their food is made out of 95% of the time these days so im not sure anybody can claim they simply don't like eating insect food without some kind of study to back it up.

by AngryData

1/1/2026 at 11:21:04 PM

I was being a little facetious. Yes they probably "like" processed insect food designed for them, but for the average dog, I'm still betting on the steak.

Wolves scavenge opportunistically, but they are first apex predators. Their primary food drive is to hunt in packs for large game and gorge. Dogs are not so far removed.

by aguacaterojo

1/1/2026 at 12:48:59 AM

Have you met dogs?

by regularfry

1/1/2026 at 5:05:41 AM

We had a dog who would pull watermelon rinds out of the compost pile to eat. We gave her nice bones, but it's not enough. Nothing is enough. All is food and food is all.

by andrewflnr

1/1/2026 at 1:46:50 PM

How mighty wolves have fallen...

by xvilka

1/1/2026 at 1:54:01 AM

Yet most people over a certain age probably have without realising. Haribo, Tropicana, lots of fruit juices, sweets and dairy products used Cochineal.

by petepete

12/31/2025 at 10:42:46 PM

People do however both keep pets and eat animals that eat insects, which is what the company was aiming for.

by Retric

12/31/2025 at 11:35:47 PM

I would happily eat cricket protein if it were more scalably environmentally sustainable. I’m fine with milk, but cows aren’t helping our greenhouse sitchu.

Not to mention the issues with pea protein and lead content.

by tyre

1/1/2026 at 6:12:57 AM

What are the problems with pea protein and lead?

by oofbey

1/1/2026 at 4:30:04 PM

A recent investigation by Consumer Reports found that plant-based protein powders, particularly those made with pea protein, contain significantly higher levels of lead compared to animal-based alternatives, with over two-thirds of tested products exceeding safe daily lead intake levels.

by zerofor_conduct

12/31/2025 at 11:25:27 PM

[dead]

by cindyllm

1/1/2026 at 2:34:52 AM

And here are some of the reasons why:

1. high risk of severe allergic reactions and cross-reactivity

2. contamination with pathogens, toxins, and heavy metals

3. digestive and nutritional drawbacks, including anti-nutrients (no pun intended) and imbalances

4. and last but not least, the good old precautionary principle: limited research on long-term human health impacts and emerging hazards

if you still want to eat zee bugz, consider yourself warned !

by zerofor_conduct

1/1/2026 at 9:12:38 AM

I don't understand why everyone involved didn't immediately realize especially the first two of those whys. Eating bugs at scale is such a surefire way to get everyone allergic to random stuffs.

And it's not like it was never tried. There are tribes and cultures that do it at tiny scales, which means humans used to do it and quit at some point in the past. It's removing not an insignificant Chesterton's Fence.

by numpad0

1/1/2026 at 12:41:55 AM

This is one of the posts on HN where I first read the dead comments. And they did not disappoint.

by jansan

1/1/2026 at 3:25:08 AM

You will eat ze bugs

by lloydatkinson

1/1/2026 at 8:31:50 AM

[dead]

by fleroviumna

12/31/2025 at 11:19:52 PM

[flagged]

by lloydatkinson

1/1/2026 at 1:21:03 PM

[flagged]

by mos87

12/28/2025 at 1:27:28 PM

[flagged]

by frogcommander

12/31/2025 at 10:35:15 PM

Because the natural order of things is wild shih tzus hunting down cows?

by benregenspan

12/31/2025 at 10:18:41 PM

Why would that be? Killing and having them eat chicken and lamb is morally superior how?

by jstummbillig

12/31/2025 at 10:34:03 PM

Ask my dog, he knows

by iancmceachern

12/31/2025 at 10:28:00 PM

if u saw what goes into commercial animal feed u might feel different about trying to figure out better ways to do it...

by yeeetz

12/31/2025 at 10:13:26 PM

Not the heckin doggos :((

by DC-3

12/31/2025 at 10:21:24 PM

…because most dogs just will eat bugs on their own, no outside influence necessary? I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make.

by nkrisc

12/31/2025 at 10:37:41 PM

I am baffled as to why cat food is labelled up as having "The great all-natural taste of beef and lamb that your cat loves!" because if my cat could naturally eat beef then that would be fucking terrifying, a 4kg cat that can eat a 600kg cow.

They should say "The great all-natural taste of mice and wasps that your cat loves!" based on observed behaviour.

by ErroneousBosh

1/1/2026 at 1:53:37 AM

Cats love tuna. Why? Basically got a lot of the amino acids that taste good to them, just coincidence.

by nkrisc

12/31/2025 at 10:48:25 PM

you eat beef and you're only 73kg and eating a 600kg cow! Baffling!

by knowitnone3

1/1/2026 at 12:12:03 AM

Thanks to tools, I'm a far more capable hunter than my cat. It's trivial for a human of any size to kill a slow moving cow. It's very hard to imagine any scenario where a domestic cat would be capable of hurting a cow, let alone kill and eat it.

by tredre3

1/1/2026 at 12:24:11 PM

Humans have been hunting prey many times larger than themselves for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years (maybe even millions).

by nkrisc

1/1/2026 at 12:50:47 PM

Actually I'm well north of 100kg, and being a tool-using ape that's about 1/6th the weight of and considerably taller than the animal I want to eat it's a fairly easy task.

If I was 1/150th the weight of a cow with my eyeline roughly level with the top of the animal's foot, armed with teeth about 12mm long and sharp claws about 5mm long, I suspect it would be considerably more difficult.

by ErroneousBosh

12/27/2025 at 2:53:44 AM

[flagged]

by 7492632928

1/1/2026 at 9:51:44 AM

Good riddance. Like the beyond meat implosion that was foreseeable from the far, it is another elitist dystopian dream getting smashed by the harsh reality of people's natural instincts.

These initiative's will be back though. Likely armed with their lessons learned, like making the government compulse us into eating it. Sugar coat it by telling us it's only once per week, or how affordable it is since we increased the prices of proper food through red tape and taxes.

by woodpanel

1/1/2026 at 7:17:32 AM

That's very good news. I hope all companies of this kind meet the same fate.

by MemesAndBooze

1/1/2026 at 10:00:24 AM

Rest assured though that they will be back.

And as always their blood of life against the public's natural disgust will be lobbying, powered by being rooted in elitist thinking.

by woodpanel

1/1/2026 at 9:31:38 AM

[dead]

by nQQKTz7dm27oZ

1/1/2026 at 7:43:45 AM

Animals served us well when human's life expectancy was 30yo

Centenarians i know are all on a plant based diet

Insects? why bother

by WhereIsTheTruth

1/1/2026 at 10:54:10 AM

There has never been a period where most humans would die at ~30.

While life expectancy at birth was ~30 for the whole history of humanity up until the mid 20th century, this doesn't in any way mean that average people died in their 30s. Instead, life expectancy was highly bi-modal: most people died as children (most before age 1, but still a large number before age ~15), and most of those that didn't die as children lived into their mid to late 50s.

by tsimionescu

1/1/2026 at 4:40:36 PM

I'd imagine they would be possibly able to self-regulate easier compared to plants

by its-summertime

12/31/2025 at 11:04:19 PM

> bankrupt despite raising over $600 million, including from Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition, taxpayers, and many others.

How on earth did French taxpayers get roped into funding a moonshot startup whose entire goal was to make pet food out of insects..

by petcat

1/1/2026 at 1:47:11 AM

Good question.

There seems to be strong lobbying for insects as human food, in particular from companies that would be happy feed us with their own shit as long as it's cheap and they could get away with it

The green-left seems to enjoy that idea. Exactly why is hard to tell - especially on HN, but let's say I don't think it's rational.

So I guess, successful lobbying?

by kpil

1/1/2026 at 8:17:15 AM

The why is not that hard to understand - insects provide a lot of proteins compared to how much food they consume over their lifetime.

But yes, the obvious place to start is to use it for feeding chickens and not humans. Why chickens? Because insects are part of their natural diet when they are free. There is just a bunch of infrastructure problems that need to be solved for that to work as insects have pretty different problems to solve compared to other parts of the food production chain.

by yxhuvud

1/1/2026 at 9:08:56 AM

None of which requires startups, science or factories.

If you put cows on a field for a day, wait three days for insects to infest their shit, then put chickens on the field, the chickens scratch through the cow shit and eat the bugs. The cow shit gets nicely spread out and fertilises the soil more quickly.

The problem with this system is that it doesn't allow rich people to screw mega bucks out of the government for doing no work at all.

by jimnotgym

1/1/2026 at 6:53:11 AM

> The green-left

You don't need left there, there is no green right

by ekianjo

1/1/2026 at 10:37:45 AM

No, but there is a non-green left. And the greens do get most of their policy influence by associating with the rest of the left, since there are very few green parties that govern directly, or at least alone. So it's fair to say that such initiatives are successful because a subset of the broader left, the green-left, likes the idea.

by tsimionescu

1/1/2026 at 8:32:40 AM

Figures are all over the place, but the figures around public funding are around 50 millions (Euros) total, including EU, national and local.

They were clearly surfing on pure hype: green, local...

by wiether

1/1/2026 at 12:47:33 PM

You should look at the percentage of fish that comes from aquaculture and where the food that they are fed comes from.

by LunaSea

1/1/2026 at 2:42:56 AM

Because pet food is a large contributor to greenhouse gas emissions?

by saagarjha

1/1/2026 at 8:03:35 AM

In Europe ist mostly crony capitalism.

Well connected people using government funds to finance their businesses.

by max_

1/1/2026 at 9:01:20 AM

Like in the US then?

by jimnotgym

1/1/2026 at 7:11:02 AM

French taxpayers need to revolt, and soon. Their situation is extremely bad

by monero-xmr

1/1/2026 at 9:02:36 AM

Nobody protests like the French!

by jimnotgym

12/31/2025 at 11:34:56 PM

[flagged]

by fluorinerocket

1/1/2026 at 12:18:07 AM

Oh my god eat some beans. Eat some tofu, eat some black-eyed peas, eat some green peas, eat some lentils, eat some northern beans, eat some lima beans, eat some chickpeas

by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF

1/1/2026 at 12:30:12 AM

What does that have to do with animal feed?

by tokai

1/1/2026 at 2:38:37 AM

No.

by Alex2037

1/1/2026 at 6:19:58 AM

no thanks

by edm0nd

12/27/2025 at 11:43:06 PM

'Ÿnsect focused on producing insect protein for animal feed and pet food'

Surely nothing could go wrong feeding herbivorous animals a diet of insect protein...

by xvxvx

12/31/2025 at 10:16:32 PM

Especially when you could have just fed them the grain directly:

…factory-scale insect production typically ends up relying on cereal by-products that are already usable as animal feed — meaning insect protein just adds an expensive extra step. For animal feed, the math simply wasn’t working.

by mikestew

12/31/2025 at 10:18:47 PM

They fooled investors with the sustainability angle. What a huge waste of money on a terrible idea cloaked in lies about sustainability.

by odie5533

12/31/2025 at 10:32:43 PM

It seems like their pet food business (where they were competing with input-intensive meat products) could genuinely have been sustainable, if they hadn't taken so much time to figure out that competing on livestock feed is hopeless.

by benregenspan

12/31/2025 at 10:45:39 PM

This sounds like "draff", or distillery mash, where you get a huge lorryload of spent grain from brewing for very little money, which is still pretty damn nutritious for cows and sheep.

Better than letting it sit and rot, emitting massive amounts of methane in the process.

by ErroneousBosh

12/31/2025 at 11:23:45 PM

plant protein is vastly inferior to animal protein. they don't feed livestock fishmeal for the hell of it.

by Alex2037

1/1/2026 at 12:12:55 AM

The quote you make doesn't mention herbivores.

Cat food contains insect protein, and cats are carnivores. They even catch and eat insects themselves.

In contrast, cats are being fed grains which they wouldn't naturally eat.

Moreover, insects are a cheap source of animal protein.

by Fnoord

12/31/2025 at 11:35:19 PM

Not all agricultural animals are herbivores. Pigs and chickens are both omnivores. Also insects are probably good feed for some species of farmed fish.

by thayne

1/1/2026 at 1:57:19 AM

Cows and horses are opportunistic omnivores.

by geon

12/31/2025 at 10:36:32 PM

From the article looks like fish feed.

by conception

1/1/2026 at 9:20:24 AM

We have food waste -> black soldier fly larva -> chicken and fish feed companies, a financially sustainable ecosystem of companies globally.

by aitchnyu

1/1/2026 at 8:24:57 AM

They are currently fed fish protein. I fail to see a difference.

by yxhuvud

12/31/2025 at 10:35:21 PM

I mean most pets are carnivores or omnivores, it sounds to me like they just scaled up before they had really found product-market fit

by guywithahat