According to Tech Crunch, there is a waste management company out there, called Better Origin, that aims to use black soldier flies in order to solve the problem posed by food-related waste.

Recently, the company secured a 16 million dollar investment, funding round that was led by Balderton Capital, a UK-based VC, which they plan to use in order to expand on their waste management system that involves the help of insects.

Using black soldier flies, the company aims to turn expiring fruits and vegetables into fodder to livestock.

Fotis Fotiadis, CEO and co-founder of Better Origin, said that "I was participating in a lot of competitions around entrepreneurship, specifically around sustainability. That’s where I met my co-founder, who is a biologist. They gave us a problem to solve: food waste and coming up with smarter ways of dealing with it."

Since the beginning, the mission of the company was how to produce food for the population in a more sustainable way, and the team points out that the current food industry is globalized, which in their opinion makes it that locally made products might disappear.

"Even the things we think are local aren't. The vast majority of the seed that gets fed to the chickens come from South America. So that causes two big problems: You need to ship things over very long distances, which is very damaging for the environment", said Fotiadis.

Leaders around the world, including US president Joe Biden, fear that the global food supply might be affected by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but Better Origin thinks they might be able to solve at least part of the problem.

Fotiadis said that "we make the food supply chain local, and we need a new ingredient to do that. Our belief is that using food waste, is this new ingredient. Food waste occurs everywhere; it is local and there are a lot of hidden nutrients in there. Our technology can take any sort of waste and convert that into food."

The company's proposal is that livestock fodder should be made onto the farms that consume the food, which reduces fodder cost and lowers emissions, while also boosting the farm's productivity.

Better Origin's plan is to take food waste from supermarkets and provide it to AI-powered insect farms which can turn that waste into a sustainable and nutritious kind of animal feed.

In December, 2021, Better Origin signed a contract to install 10 of these insect-based farms for Morrison egg farms.

Through to the business model, the company is supposed to save as much as 5.700 tons of CO2 emission yearly.

The company currently has five mini-farms operating, but the team behind the project plans to expand their operations until next year.

"I’m hoping that if one thing goes according to plan we should have 20 ordered in the next couple of months", Fotiadis added.