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". Instead, all used "high-quality, often grain-based substrates" already "widely used as animal feed."¹

Protix's own inputs are feed-grade byproducts like starch from potato peels which is already bought by farmers as livestock feed.⁶ Feeding potato peels to insects instead of directly to pigs does not 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 The Stockholm Environment Institute warns that "many LCAs on insect farming are outdated, yet recent studies often continue to rely on their assumptions."¹ The Protix LCA specifically lacks transparency on two critical inputs responsible for the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

Additionally, the fact that one of the authors of the Protix-cited LCA has been working at Protix for about ~10 years raises questions about the independence of the study.

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.¹¹¹⁸ 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 Poland gone and the United States stalled, the case for more funding now rests on the South Korea plant. It seems to be upon Protix leadership to prove why 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. That is about a fourfold gap that seems unrealistic to close anytime soon.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 whopping 15% interest rate.¹⁶ A second tranche of that rescue funding depends on the company meeting "operational conditions." The accounts tie its future to delivering its expansion plans.¹⁶ But those plans have since stalled or been abandoned. The Poland plant is in liquidation,¹⁰ and the United States plant is on hold.¹¹ The accounts themselves record that the company "executed a considerable workforce reduction."¹⁶

Protix calls industrial insect farming "natural." The Stockholm Environment Institute assesses that it "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."¹

Newer research goes further. A 2026 study in the Journal of Applied Ecology warns that farmed insects could outcompete native wildlife and permanently alter local food webs, and its authors call the risk a global policy priority.²⁰ Other work finds that today's farms lack the controls needed to stop escapes,²² and urges strict biosecurity and careful choice of which species are farmed.²¹