ERMELO, NETHERLANDS — Protifarm, a Dutch AgriTech company, producing insect nutrition for food production, is teaming up with Swissmill, a flour mill in Switzerland, and RethinkResource to upcycle byproducts of Swissmill through insects into high-quality food ingredients.

Swissmill, a division of Coop Cooperative, processes over 200,000 tonnes of grain every year in its production site in Zürich, Switzerland. The byproducts are not fit for human consumption. However, by using these as food for Protifarm’s Buffalo Beetle, they can now process these byproducts into high-quality food ingredients.

“It is our mission to accelerate our impact by licensing our strong knowledge, experience and intellectual property to upcycle side streams all around the world, by using our Buffalo Beetle,” said Tom Mohrmann, chief executive officer of Protifarm. “This way, we can produce sustainable healthy food ingredients to feed the world without consuming the earth. Our processes are easily scalable in vertical farms. By establishing them around the world, we can keep the food miles as low as possible. This Swiss pilot is a first careful step.”

This expansion is Protifarm’s first step to establish licensed cultivation and processing plants around the world within the next 10 years.

The upcycling of the grain milling byproducts to insect proteins is part of a pilot license project and it will be evaluated after three years.