For many people, a thought of traffic with billions of flies buzzing around rotting food is stomach churning.

But for Jason and David Drew, it’s business.

The dual brothers possess a association in South Africa that gets flies to lay hundreds of millions of eggs on food rubbish any day. The larvae are afterwards sole as animal feed.

The Drews’ company, AgriProtein, says a caterpillar dishes are an environmentally accessible choice to fish meal, a widely used animal feed done with belligerent dusty fish.

“We take rubbish and modify it into a 3 products — one of that is protein,” Jason Drew, a company’s CEO, told CNN. The others are an animal feed done regulating oil extracted from larvae, and a manure done with a mix of larvae and garden compost.

AgriProtein was founded in 2008. It lifted $105 million in a many new turn of appropriation this year and is valued during some-more than $200 million, according to a founders.

‘Nutrient recycling’

Jason’s eureka impulse positively wasn’t glamorous. In 2007, carrying sole his telecommunications business a few years earlier, he embarked on a passion plan to “follow food bondage around a world.”

Seeing rubbish tips surrounded by flies, he satisfied a insects’ larvae were an untapped source of protein.

The Drews contend they have been preoccupied with insects ever given they used flies and maggots to go fishing as children during their grandparents’ home in England. Combining that seductiveness with a enterprise to make food reserve some-more environmentally sustainable, they began researching a scholarship behind insect farming.

“We call it ‘nutrient recycling,'” Jason said. “[We are] recycling rubbish nutrients into healthy protein for duck and fish.”

Today, AgriProtein has fly factories in Cape Town and Durban. Each bureau contains 8.4 billion flies, and takes in 276 tons of food rubbish any day. The flies lay 340 million eggs on a rubbish any day.

‘Exciting times for humanity’

Making dishes out of maggots took a while to succeed.

“We spent scarcely 5 years in contemptible failure,” Jason said. “If we had famous how tough it would be, and how most it would cost, we would substantially not have started.”

The brothers perceived dual grants from a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to assistance account their research, though they found it harder than approaching to master techniques for augmenting a series of larvae and gripping them alive for prolonged enough. They also encountered problems gripping costs underneath control as they attempted to grow a business.

But finally, things started to click.

AgriProtein hired a initial worker in 2009 and now has 145. Last year, it sealed a $10 million deal with engineering organisation Christof Industries to set adult 100 fly factories worldwide by 2024. The association skeleton to hurl out comforts in Asia, a Middle East, Europe and a United States.

The fledgling attention is growing, according to Jason.

“It is sparkling times for amiability as we start to tackle rubbish and protein problems,” he said.