Learn · Article
BSF Bible teaser
This week I wrote three posts for three different audiences — Mon for biowaste producers, Tue for BSF growers, Thu for everyone trying to use AI to run a case. Reading the responses, one thing keeps surfacing — and I'm not the only one saying it.
01 · The gap
Three audiences, no honest answers
The BSF industry has a transparency problem.
Nobody is helping buyers — feed mills, pet food companies, growers — assess pricing, quality, or value in any honest way. Almost no real reference cases. No transparent pricing. No straightforward "here is how you use BSF larvae or meal in your feed and here is what it does to your costs". Vendor pitches and scientific papers — that's the menu.
Nobody is helping BSF producers either. Production numbers are guarded as if they were proprietary moats. Real BCRs, real cycle times, real OPEX per ton, real CAPEX per t/d — almost none of it is published. New operators learn by burning money on the same mistakes the last cohort burned money on.
And nobody is helping biowaste producers see what their waste might actually be worth, how to evaluate it, or how it compares against biogas, composting, or landfill. Most of them don't know they have a question to ask.
02 · What's missing
Real numbers, shared honestly
What's missing across all three is the same thing: transparent financial numbers. When does BSF make economic sense? At what biowaste cost, what soy meal price, what feed-inclusion rate, what scale? Under what circumstances is BSF protein price-competitive against fishmeal or soy meal — and when is it not? Those are answerable questions. They're just not answered anywhere in public.
8+ years across 50+ customers on 6 continents have given us the data and the insight to start answering them honestly. We will. Anonymized, NDAs intact — but real numbers, real prices, real ranges. And we'll keep updating as new facts come in. Better honest and revisable than vague and permanent.
We're not alone in seeing this gap. We're going to do something about it.
03 · Take part
Join the conversation
Do you want to join?
If you're a buyer, a BSF grower, or a biowaste producer with a question on pricing, quality, or economics nobody has answered for you — drop it in the comments or DM me. If you've got data, experience, or insight worth contributing, same.
Keep exploring
Related topics and pages
- BSF business case evaluation — the evaluation process for telling a working BSF facility from a headline
- BSF profit is made on the buy, not the sell — why substrate cost and waste-stream sourcing decide the outcome
- Articles library — the written notes this post joins
Read next
- BSF business case evaluation — the process that separates working facilities from the headlines — the process for separating a working BSF facility from a headline
- BSF profit is made on the buy, not the sell — the sourcing rule behind the buy: substrate cost and each waste stream as its own case
- You have a biowaste problem. Could it actually become profitable? — the 3-step evaluation for whether a biowaste stream can pay
- KALARVO Recipe Test Round 1 Teaser — a field note on the tray-level results behind the numbers this post asks for
Next step
Bring your pricing question
If a pricing, quality or economics question about BSF has gone unanswered, Manna can look at it with the data and case experience behind this post.