ARTICLE 48 Alternative Proteins Magazine April 2024 About Nick Piggott Nick Piggott is a co-founder and Co-CEO of Nutrition Technologies, an industrial insect manufacturer based in South East Asia. With a background in Life Sciences, Piggott was exposed to the challenges of food security whilst working for the UN in West Africa, and the company has since developed insect-based feed-ingredients for the livestock and aquaculture industries to address this issue. Piggott is the industry-side face of Nutrition Technologies, overseeing the product, regulatory, & client side of the business, ensuring that the organization maintains constant awareness of the competitive & regulatory landscape, market trends, technology developments and industry standards. that different production systems can have vastly different environmental impacts, and that different insect meals aren’t necessarily interchangeable when it comes to sustainability metrics. A BSF producer operating in cold winter climates must heat, light and humidify huge volumes of warehouse air, demanding significant energy inputs, which can have a massive impact on Green House Gas (GHG) emissions. Similarly, feeding insects with corn, wheat and barley byproducts (which themselves could otherwise be used as a direct animal feed) have massive environmental footprints, which impacts the ‘real’ sustainability of the resulting insect meal. While sustainability is a growing issue around the world and climate-aware consumers are asking more demanding questions about supply-chain transparency, reducing environmental impacts is still not a priority for many producers, particularly during periods of market volatility, outbreaks of disease (eg ASF), and other more immediately pressing issues exist. However, there is a vast and rapidly growing body of evidence that proves that not only does a tropically-produced insect-based feed reduce the environmental impact associated with livestock production, it also improves the feed uptake & feed efficiency, can increase resistance to common pathogens thereby reducing the usage of antibiotics, and reduce the overall costs of livestock production. Insect meal is a complex ingredient with multiple value propositions spanning nutritional, environmental and functional, and it is for these reasons that formulators and farm operators should look at the ingredient through a multifaceted, holistic lens.
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