Protix says one thing.
The science says another.

Commercial insect farms don't run on waste. The Stockholm Environment Institute cites an assessment of 13 US and European farms in which "none of them use food waste as feed" — all used "high-quality, often grain-based substrates" already "widely used as animal feed."¹

Protix's own inputs seem to be feed-grade byproducts like starch from potato peels which we suspect is the same material livestock farmers already buy.⁶ Feeding potato peels to insects instead of directly to pigs does in fact not seem to unlock otherwise unusable waste.¹

Almost no one eats insects directly; insect protein is overwhelmingly grown to feed other farmed animals.¹ The Stockholm Environment Institute points out that farmed insects are "used as inputs for conventional animal agriculture and aquaculture. This reinforces rather than disrupts existing high-impact industrial production of beef, pork, chicken and fish."¹

Publicly available data on Protix customers suggest all of them are either selling animal feed or pet food. None of them sells insect protein for human consumption.⁷

Two independent studies contradict this Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) provided by Protix roughly by an entire order of magnitude. The Stockholm Environment Institute places insects at ~13.5 kg CO₂e/kg vs soymeal at 0.9–2.2 and fishmeal at 0.2–9.3.¹ The UK government's commissioned LCA concludes that insect meal is in fact 5.7–13.5× worse than soybean meal and 1.6–3.8× worse than fishmeal.²

How can this stark contradiction be explained? The Stockholm Environment Institute warns that "many LCAs on insect farming are outdated, yet recent studies often continue to rely on their assumptions."¹ The Protix LCA specifically lacks transparency on two critical inputs responsible for the majority of the footprint: feed and energy.⁴

1. The feed ingredients are assumed to be otherwise unusable waste. The study cites "grey starch" as a feed ingredient but gives no data on the feed composition, which is held confidential by Protix. But Het Financieele Dagblad cites industry experts who assume Protix feed could indeed be fed directly to conventional livestock — in which case the emissions of producing it must be accounted for in an LCA.⁶
2. The plant's energy is assumed to be wind power. But in the Netherlands, natural gas is still the largest electricity source, and it emits far more greenhouse gas per unit of electricity than wind.⁴⁸

The last two flagship expansions have failed or been halted. The Polish Protix Poland plant entered liquidation on 3 June 2026, and it is to be assumed that the €37M committed by the EIB has been withdrawn.¹⁰ The Tyson-backed US plant has stalled — Vox reported that Tyson has since withdrawn its air-permit application for the plant.¹¹²¹ So far the South Korea plant seems to remain a vague project with a feasibility study, as there has been no news of a signed joint-venture deal nor committed capital.¹²

With a track record of expansion failures, it seems to be upon Protix to demonstrate that this time around everything will be different.

Independent analysis puts the cost of black-soldier-fly protein at roughly €5,000 a tonne against the ~€1,300 a tonne it would need to compete with fishmeal — about a fourfold gap.¹³ A Rabobank analyst notes the fish-feed industry "today uses virtually no insect proteins"; major Dutch feed producers (AgriFirm, ForFarmers) dropped Protix's insect protein "on a commercial consideration."¹³ The authors of an industrial-scale cost model of insect production in the Netherlands (with the INSECTFEED consortium) conclude that "insects will likely not be part of mass farm-animal feed in the near future."¹⁴

According to Protix's 2024 accounts, revenue was €11.8M in 2024 against €36.4M in operating costs. Growth was essentially flat (+0.5%) on 2023, after two years of >30% growth.¹⁶ Accumulated losses reached ~€135M, against ~€172M ever paid in by shareholders. Cash more than halved in a year, from €41.3M to €19.9M.¹⁶

Deloitte signed those accounts with an emphasis on "material uncertainty … ability to continue as a going concern."¹⁶ In August 2025 the company raised a €19M emergency convertible loan from its existing shareholders at a 15% cash coupon — two to four times the 3.96–6.18% it pays on its own secured bank loans.¹⁶ Rumors say it has also cut a substantial share of its workforce.¹³

Protix seems to acknowledge that it needs to care for the wellbeing of the animals it farms. Here it agrees with the more than 500 scientists who signed the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness¹⁷, and with the Dutch government, which says it treats invertebrates such as insects "as if they are sentient."¹⁸

The Protix website, however, remains vague about the protocols, measures and monitoring that ensure that wellbeing is upheld. In commercial insect farming it is, for example, standard practice to starve adult breeder flies by not providing feed — even though studies show they require food to survive.¹⁹ The Stockholm Environment Institute's sixth challenge notes that insect "welfare needs throughout production — from hatching to transport and slaughter — could be significant, yet are poorly understood and rarely considered."¹

Is building megafactories to stack insects up in crates really natural? The Stockholm Environment Institute assesses that industrial insect farming "may pose ecological risks through unintentional release," where "both native and non-native species may compete with pollinators, spread disease or harm crops."¹

Insects are easy to farm due to their high reproductive rates, adaptability to varied feeds and resistance to disease. However, the SEI continue that these traits "could also predispose them to thrive in wild environments following escape," and that "recapture is extremely difficult, if not impossible." It also notes that policies to guard against these biodiversity risks "remain limited."¹