INTERVIEW Alternative Proteins Magazine April 2025 45 There are certainly more companies forming in the sector. I started the UKEIA ten years ago. I was doing it as an enthusiast, as I had an interest in the sector. Over the years, it's become much more of a substantial trade association. So, we're providing a broader range of services and developing many different resources. As the membership grows, it's more useful for people to become a member because they can then access that network, as well as that set of resources. So, it is a snowballing effect. To mention some of the things we've done recently, we worked with the Food Standards Agency and submitted a number of novel food dossiers to get approval for edible insects in the UK. We've partnered with the National Alternative Protein Innovation Centre and we have also created a Directory of over 50 academic specialists and their research facilities, so that our members have access to those research resources. Additionally, we do a lot of public-facing work, particularly around the future of food, attending events, providing tastings, etc. What is the current state of the insect industry in the UK? How many farms are involved in insect farming, what is their production, what species are usually farmed (or allowed to be farmed) and what is the most common use of these farmed insects? The current state of the industry is rapidly changing. We have about 35 company members, but we map other companies that are not yet joined. There are nearly 20 companies that we know focused on pet food, a similar number of aiming at products for human consumption and nearly 25 companies working on livestock feed. But some of them are farms, some are product companies, while others are technology companies. The number of farms is quite fluid, as some people start up a farming operation to just test it out. Most farms in the UK are farming black soldier flies, which is a very good insect to farm for livestock feed. There are a few that farm mealworms, and even fewer that farm crickets or other invertebrates. What we've been seeing is a growing interest amongst the large-scale food sector players in the UK. Big retail chains, including Tesco and Waitrose, are actively looking at how they can use insect bioconversion to manage their waste. I think over the next five years, we could potentially see 30 to 40 insect farming sites across the UK, each potentially on the scale of 30,000 tons per year. That means there could be 1 million tons of insect farming production per year, but that is still a very small amount of the actual potential. In its report titled The Future of Feed: A WWF Roadmap to Accelerating Insect Protein in UK Feeds, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) predicts that UK insect farms could convert 3.4 million tons of feed substrate into protein.
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