THE FLY IS TROPICAL
A billion dollars, one sentence, and the country nobody would go to
On 1 December 2025 the commercial court of Evry pronounced the judicial liquidation of Ÿnsect.
The company was fourteen years old. Its factory at Poulainville, near Amiens, was forty five thousand square metres of vertical insect rearing, the largest of its kind ever built, an investment of a hundred and fifty million euros inside a total capital mobilisation that the Hauts-de-France regional authority puts at over six hundred million. The state backed it. Bpifrance backed it. The regional authorities backed it. Private investors backed it. Every one of them, in the region’s own words, convinced at the highest level.
Between 2020 and 2023 the company sold one point nine million euros of product.
Over the same period its losses exceeded two hundred and thirty million.
Forty three people were dismissed. The site is now a brownfield, and the Caisse des Dépôts, which owns it, has been asked to study the conditions of its reindustrialisation. In the language of the state, that is what a corpse is called.
Ÿnsect is not the only one, and this is the part that matters. Denmark’s ENORM Biofactory, the largest insect facility in northern Europe, twenty two thousand square metres at Hvirring, designed for over ten thousand tonnes of black soldier fly meal a year, went into court restructuring in April 2025 and was declared bankrupt. Its estate sold for sixty three point eight million Danish kroner against creditor claims of around five hundred and seventy five million. Eleven cents on the krone. France’s Agronutris filed a safeguard procedure. South Africa’s Inseco ceased operations and sold its assets. Canada’s Aspire Food Group collapsed under debt and its Ontario site was sold by court order.
The sector-level figure is the one to hold. Around thirty six percent of all disclosed investment into black soldier fly companies has gone to firms that have since ceased operations or entered court supervision, and investment across the sector fell sixty five percent between 2022 and 2024.
More than a third of the money is already gone.
What they were building
The black soldier fly, Hermetia illucens, is native to the neotropics. It is now cosmopolitan, in the sense that it has spread, but the thing that spread is an organism with fixed requirements. It wants warmth and it wants humidity, and given both it will convert almost any organic residue into protein and lipid at a speed nothing in a laboratory can match. It has done this for millions of years and it has never once required a boiler.
So look at what ENORM installed at Hvirring, and look at who supplied it. SKOV provided the climate systems. Inno+ provided the air cleaning and heat recovery. Big Dutchman provided the liquid feeding, XIO the automation logistics. A subsidiary group of the Big Dutchman corporation, the people who build livestock housing, assembled a controlled environment inside a Danish field for an insect from the tropics.
That is what the capital bought. Not a farm. A machine for holding a climate in place against a continent that does not want it there, every hour, for the life of the asset. The heat is a line item. The humidity is a line item. And neither line ever goes away, because the sky outside is not cooperating and will not begin to.
The failure reports say the rest. ENORM was delayed in construction, delayed in commissioning, and struggled with weak market demand and odour complaints from its neighbours. The COO said the company had strong interest and premium pricing potential until late 2024, but that as it neared full readiness, market momentum waned significantly. Read that as a professional would. They spent fifty five million euros and by the time they could actually produce, the price they had modelled was no longer there.
The Insect Institute puts the number on it. For animal feed, insect protein costs between two and ten times as much as soy or fishmeal. Two to ten times the price of the thing it was supposed to replace.
That is not a market failure. That is a cost structure, and a cost structure is arithmetic, and the arithmetic was available on the day the first term sheet was signed.
The Belgian who read the map
The following sentence should end every discussion about this industry.
