Darling Ingredients Inc. has acquired the remaining 50% of EnviroFlight, LLC from Intrexon Corporation, meaning it now wholly owns the company.
Darling said it plans to leverage its 135 years of sustainable ingredient experience with EnviroFlight’s innovative approach to black soldier fly (BSF) larvae rearing and processing to develop cutting-edge, sustainable specialty proteins for pet food and feed.
“EnviroFlight's scalable approach utilizing BSF larvae opens the door to a plentiful source of high-quality nutrients for the animal feed and pet food industries,” Darling Ingredients stated in a press release.
Darling first acquired 50% of EnviroFlight in 2016. The total acquisition of EnviroFlight will bolster Darling’s capabilities in developing high-quality scalable and pathogen-free proteins for sustainable feed solutions.
"Expanding our ownership of EnviroFlight empowers us to accelerate our ability to create higher value, sustainable specialty proteins for the agriculture and companion animal feed industries," said Randall Stuewe, chairman and CEO of Darling Ingredients. "Our purpose is to repurpose, and growing insects for specialty feed ingredients yields 10 times the usable protein per acre compared to producing algae and is at least 50 times the protein per acre compared to soy.”
EnviroFlight’s current dried BSF larvae production capacity is 900 tons annually. It opened its first production facility in Maysville, Kentucky in late 2018. EnviroFlight has tested the safety of BSF-derived feed ingredients on poultry and swine, as well as companion animals, and found them to be a safe, highly digestible nutrient.
Liz Koutsos, Ph.D., president of EnviroFlight, added, "EnviroFlight has focused on driving necessary change in the global food supply chain to meet the demands of a growing population, and we look forward to working more closely with Darling Ingredients to realize the considerable promise of insect bioconversion to offer solutions that meet this goal.”
EnviroFlight's mission is to develop sustainable animal and plant nutrients using regionally available, low-value materials, with emphasis on producing nutrients in a socially responsible way, eliminating toxins, hormones and antibiotics from our food supply, and reducing the environmental and financial costs to our food supply.
