Real trials in a climate-controlled container

01 · Real scale

Production trays, not jars

Small lab tests tell you whether larvae will eat something. They do not tell you how a recipe behaves in a full rearing tray, at production density, in a real facility. In KALARVO we tested Kainuu fish side streams at that real scale, and a 20-foot Manna MIND container made it straightforward.

Every recipe ran in the same standard 60 × 40 cm rearing trays used in production. Each tray held about 8 kg of mix and 10,000 five-day-old larvae, with 3–5 replicate trays per recipe. Over three rounds that came to 70 recipes, with more than a hundred trays in the container at once in the first round.

At this scale the results answer practical questions: how much larvae a tray yields, how fast the mix finishes, and which recipes collapse when they get too wet. Those are the things a future producer needs to know, and they rarely show up in a beaker.

02 · One climate

One climate for every recipe

The container's heating, cooling, humidification and ventilation equipment is run by Manna MIND. MIND reads its sensors continuously, adjusts the equipment automatically and stores every reading in the cloud. In KALARVO it worked to a simple plan:

Setting

Air temperature at loading

Target

34 °C, so the wet mix itself reaches about 30 °C
Air temperature from day 2

Target

28–32 °C
Relative humidity

Target

about 70 %
Light

Target

24 hours a day
CO₂

Target

kept below set limits

The same conditions repeated round after round: relative humidity averaged 72.3 % in round 1 and 69.8 % in round 2. Every recipe in a round grew in the same climate, so a difference in the result came from the recipe, not from the room.

03 · What steady conditions reveal

Precise conditions reveal what really matters

Holding the climate steady is what made one of the project's key findings visible. The same humidity of about 70 % sat over mixes that dried out and mixes that drowned. The air was the same; the recipes were not. The moisture of the mix is decided in the recipe, and that is where to fix it.

The log also gives every round a complete record of the conditions the larvae actually had, hour by hour. When a batch finishes early or a recipe fails, the climate can be ruled in or out from the data instead of from memory.

04 · Easy to repeat

Easy to run, easy to repeat

A trial like this needs little more than the container, the trays and people for loading and harvest days. There is no lab booking and no dedicated research building. MIND keeps the climate on target day and night, remote monitoring shows the state of the trial at any time, and the same set-up can be run again for the next round or the next raw material.

05 · What this means

What this means

If you want to know whether a side stream works for black soldier fly larvae, test it the way it would be produced: real trays, real density, a controlled climate and full data. A climate-controlled container gives you that without building a facility first.

Planning trials with your own side stream? Get in touch with Manna Insect.

Kajaani University of Applied Sciences (KAMK) procured black soldier fly larvae rearing trials on Kainuu fish side streams as part of the KALARVO project (Processing fish side streams into value products). Manna Insect carried out the trials as the contractor, responsible for the trial design, measurements and analysis. Co-funded by the European Union.