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IFW 2026 talk recap

I gave my talk at IFW 2026 in Torino on Friday — "Critical Business Metrics of BSF Bio-waste Operation." Slides attached.

01 · The core idea

Biowaste recycling first

The core idea: treat black soldier fly as biowaste recycling first, and the whole value proposition changes. It's the untapped lever most business plans miss. The job is to recycle a tonne of organic waste at the lowest cost — and the larvae and frass aren't just a protein product, they're the discount that pushes that cost down, ideally below what the producer already pays to dispose of it. Their ceiling is roughly soy-meal parity, not a premium-protein multiple — and that's enough.

02 · The filter

Disprove the case first

So the question is never "is BSF profitable?" but "how many things line up at this site, and is anything a showstopper?" I start with a triangle — legislation, the biowaste (cost + quality), the BSF products (use-case + price) — and try to disprove the case first; you can't spec the larvae, you get what the substrate gives. Then a hard advantages checklist: cheap or free feedstock already on site, low-cost or grant-funded infrastructure, low-cost energy, a nearby buyer, permissive law, low labour. Only when advantages clearly outweigh disadvantages do detailed numbers make sense. Maybe one or two sites in ten get past that filter.

03 · Three cases

Three real cases

We ran the framework across three real cases — EU (planning), South Asia and Southern Africa (operating). All three work, none for the same reason:

  • EU: law blocks larvae from feed, so it's a capital-handled waste utility — break-even gate fee ~$16/t, against the $55–165/t cities pay to incinerate.
  • South Asia: free on-site waste, open feed channel, low CAPEX — +18% margin at a $0 gate fee, +37% selling larvae live.
  • Southern Africa: EU-level output prices on a low-cost base — +4% rising to +30% live, building the whole chain yourself.

04 · Findings

CAPEX and the OPEX stack

Two findings stood out. CAPEX runs ~3× higher in the EU (~$87k vs ~$29–31k per tonne/day) — that's the civil envelope, not the biology. And the OPEX stack flips: labour is ~67% of cost in the EU versus ~14% in the developing cases. Same headline OPEX, opposite structure — the total tells you little, the stack tells you everything.

05 · The bottleneck

The business model, not the biology

The real bottleneck isn't biology — the process is mature. Projects fail on the business model: the interfaces to paying customers at both ends, the waste producer and the output buyer. Drying is the big cost lever; premium protein is out; the frontier — oil, chitin, functional protein, NPK — is real but short on references, so start with the low-hanging fruit and learn upward.

06 · The unlock

Working together

The unlock is working together: shared benchmarks, standard ways to contract waste and offtake, the missing interfaces built once instead of fifty times. Manna doesn't operate plants — we license the methodology and tools through joint ventures — so the value was never in hoarding numbers. Methodology shared openly; if you're weighing a case, my inbox is open.

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Manna can take the same framework through the legislation, waste, products, advantages and costs of a specific BSF case.

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