A Cape Town-based startup provides black soldier flies as a source of protein for animal feed and pet food.His business now exports to the EU and US.A Cape Town-based startup is providing black soldier flies as a source of protein for use in pet food and animal feed.
"That is where it all started," he says. Smorenburg says that as he travelled across the world through his work, he was also exposed to different technologies and business models which helped him set up his business, Maltento, in 2018.The business has a facility in Epping which employs about 60 people who farm with the black soldier flies in controlled environments, says Smorenburg.It takes about seven days to harvest the insects.
Dehydrated or dried-down flies are one of the products that are exported as feed for chickens and wild birds.Smorenburg said that a life cycle analysis is still to be done to measure the environmental impacts of this process. But largely, the business helps to divert significant amounts of organic waste from"less efficient destinies" like landfills where they would release emissions.
The plant is also efficient in other ways. For one, the black soldier flies are farmed in containers that are stacked on top of each other – which means the yield per square meter is 14 times higher."Every week we get a new harvest… We get 52 harvests in a year, or 14 times the amount of land that we sit on," says Smorenburg.There is room to improve energy efficiency. Maltento currently relies on fossil fuel-based electricity.