Maggots Are an Incredibly Efficient Source of Protein, Which May Make Them the Next Superfood for Humans

Maggots Are an Incredibly Efficient Source of Protein, Which May Make Them the Next Superfood for Humans

Inexpensive to raise and insatiably hungry for trash, black soldier fly larvae are already on the menu for livestock, pets and, maybe soon, people

Photographs by Justin Jin and Khadija Farah

January/February 2026

It’s mango season in Kenya. Evidence of this fact is heaped two stories high outside a greenhouse on the outskirts of Nairobi: a 900-ton mound of mango detritus reeking sweetly in the February sun. The mango is waste from a processing plant, but it won’t in fact be wasted, because just beyond the heap, inside that greenhouse, are 128 million creatures that like their food rotten.

They are maggots. Specifically, they are larvae of the black soldier fly, being reared by InsectiPro, one of Kenya’s largest black soldier fly farms. Once they mature, the larvae will be made into protein meal, used in animal feed. A 2021 review article counted 950 published papers on the use of edible insects such as the black soldier fly—for fish, for poultry and pigs, for crustaceans, for rabbits. If you search the online magazine Pet Food Processing using the keywords “black soldier fly,” 136 articles come up. Are maggots the superfood of the future?

Nina de Groot, InsectiPro’s head of operations, would say yes. Right now, American adults get about two-thirds of their protein from animal products. Those animals feed on crops like corn, barley and oats, which require huge quantities of land, water, fertilizer and pesticides.

Black soldier fly larvae are a more sustainable alternative and offer a nutritious food source for pets and livestock. More humans may soon be eating them, too—companies are looking into selling protein bars and shakes, ice cream, and falafel mix made with black soldier fly larvae. 

De Groot is 30 years old, dry of wit and long of leg. If you have in your head an idea of a maggot farmer, I wager it does not align with Nina de Groot. The day I visit, she’s wearing a cropped black sweater and high-waisted linen pants. 

The greenhouse is filled with black plastic boxes that contain ground mango goo and the larvae that are devouring it. The boxes are stacked six or seven high and arranged in neat rows. One operation I read about referred to this sort of setup as the “modular fattening system.” I mention this. De Groot laughs. “It’s crates.”

She sets one out so I can see what’s going on inside. Fattening—eating—is, for the maggot, an athletic activity. It’s a massed, writhing competition for the best seats: close to the food but away from the light. “In two hours,” de Groot says, holding a mango, “this is completely gone.” The collective horde consumes 16.5 tons of crop waste a day. 

The black soldier fly larva is a voracious eater because it has to be. Upon waking from its shape-shifting pupatory nap, the black soldier fly will never eat another meal again. Feast while you can, youngster! For the rest of their short lives, the flies must rely on the fat and nutrients they took in as seething grubs. They are a living pantry for their own future selves. Thus BSFL, as the larvae are known among those who work with them, are a highly concentrated food source. This in part explains their tremendous potential as animal feed. Also, they are cheap to raise—vertically farmed and content to live on waste material no other industry wants. Low-quality input, high-quality output. Of the $2 billion invested in insect farming to date, over half of that has funded black soldier fly farming operations. 

Black soldier flies are especially efficient processors of waste. They have a high feed conversion rate, a closely watched metric in the animal feed industry. According to Maye Walraven, general manager of U.S. operations for Innovafeed, the world’s largest producer of black soldier fly larvae, “Everything you feed them turns into live biomass.” In contrast, she said, “A chicken has a feed conversion ratio of three or four. Over the span of its life, you have to feed it four times what it will weigh at the time you harvest it.” There is no published feed conversation ratio for humans. But a back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that you, reader, have a ratio closer to four-to-one.

Further contributing to the black soldier fly’s popularity is the speed with which the larvae grow from speck to full-size grub. It is the equivalent of, as one industry website puts it, “newborn to blue whale in two weeks.” 

We stand for a moment, watching the squirming mass. It’s kind of hypnotic. De Groot says to me, “You can grab some and hold them in your hand.” Nothing happens. She revises the statement. “I can put some in your hand. It’s nice. A little massage.”

She’s correct. It’s a featherweight version of an automated massage unit. I’m relieved to find that the larvae are not slimy, though the relief is undermined somewhat by a feeling I recognize from each time a child has handed me a hamster or guinea pig to hold and pet: the low-grade dread of being shat on. After a few seconds, I tip the larvae back into the crate and inspect my palm. There are a few tiny smears, which a cursory rinse doesn’t entirely remove. Multiply this by 128 million small smears and you have the nine towering piles of larvae excrement, or frass, behind the greenhouse. The plan is to sell it as a soil amendment, though demand has not yet caught up to supply. 

We are joined by InsectiPro founder and CEO Talash Huijbers. Without thinking, I shake her hand. Huijbers directs my eye to an experimental plot of corn that has benefited from BSFL fertilizer. She says farmers have reported a 28 percent average increase in crop yields. Why, then, aren’t they lining up at the gate to buy it? Kenyan farmers are wary. In 2024, bags of government-subsidized “fertilizer” turned out to be diatomite, a kind of sediment used as insulation. “The government literally sold them bags of stones,” Huijbers says. 

Six workers in orange jumpsuits are working the nearest pile. The frass needs to compost, so the crew must turn the pile, shovel load by shovel load. On the topic of turnover: Is it hard to find people to do this work? De Groot says it isn’t, and that the smells don’t bother her. Not the rotting mango smell, not the frass, not even the stench inside the insect breeding area. To encourage females to settle in and lay eggs, InsectiPro lines the bottom of the fly enclosures with a time-tested blend of rotted vegetable matter deemed “just below gag-worthy.”

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What, you may or may not be wondering, is the appeal of stinking matter for a fly? The nutrients in decomposed material are readily available. Bacteria have had a head start on breaking down the nutrients, taking a load off the eater’s digestive tract. In the Journal of Insects as Food and Feed paper “Upcycling of Manure With Insects: Current and Future Prospects,” the decomposition ecologist Jeff Tomberlin and his colleagues write that adding poultry manure to the flies’ diet can increase their larval weight by 75 percent and decrease their development time by two days.  

On a small scale, it’s possible to envision a completely zero-waste circular economy. Let’s say you keep chickens. You can feed maggots to the chickens, and feed human food waste to the maggots, while using the maggots’ own waste as manure to grow more produce. A local luxury establishment, the Ololo Safari Lodge & Farm, has had success with this. 

Safety regulations in the United States require commercial operations to feed larvae pre-consumer food waste to avoid introducing pathogens. In some ways, it’s a shame, because if they were fed livestock manure, it would help keep it off the land and out of the water. (Though manure is valuable as fertilizer, large farms produce more than can be used.) And manure processed by BSFL is less pathogenic than one might assume. Larvae naturally live in and ingest legions of bacteria—the drivers of rot—and for this reason have evolved powerful antimicrobial defenses. 

What’s more, they appear to pass these defenses on to livestock that consume them. The paper Tomberlin co-wrote mentions a study in which hens fed BSFL meal had—compared with hens fed traditional feed—lower counts of E. coli and other “bad” bacteria and higher counts of Lactobacillus (“good”) bacteria. According to a 2020 review paper in the same journal, insect additives in poultry and crayfish feed have at certain levels been shown to diversify the gut microbiome. Pigs might benefit similarly. Studies have shown that piglets receiving BSFL-supplemented food have fewer bouts of diarrhea and healthier immune systems.

Huijbers outlines other advantages of animal feed made with BSFL. In a small experiment undertaken by InsectiPro with the cooperation of a local pig farmer, five pigs fed a diet supplemented with BSFL were ready for market about two months sooner than usual. The exoskeletons of the larvae contribute calcium and chitin. “If you feed chickens BSFL, the eggshells are stronger, so there’s less breakage in transit, ” Huijbers says. Chitin is a good fiber source and may have digestive benefits. Using feed made with insect protein provides a nice sustainability narrative as well. Insect farming uses a fraction of the resources—land, energy, water—that it takes to grow corn or soy.

Given these benefits, are American poultry and pig producers switching to feed made with BSFL? Not yet. It comes down to cost. Animal feed is a low-margin business. Soy and corn are cheap, heavily subsidized and grown on a massive scale. “It’s really hard to do something at a large scale and compete with commodities,” says Walraven, the general manager at the French-based company Innovafeed. And sustainability is not typically a prime concern among large-scale pig and poultry operations and the feed producers that supply them.

The situation is different in Kenya, where the soybean and corn supply struggles to meet demand, and the high costs of feed put pressure on farmers. The appetite for InsectiPro’s product is high—too high, Huijbers says. The company is currently contracted for almost 2,200 tons of product, which, she says, will take her at least five years to deliver.

The Innovafeed facility in Nesle, France, has a production floor area the size of eight soccer fields. It has an annual output of 25,000 tons of larvae. “Imagine two Boeing 747s of maggots per week,” Walraven says, memorably, when we speak by phone. Who in Europe is buying all this insect protein? Fish farms are a key market. More than half of the world’s farmed Atlantic salmon comes from Norway, and the alternative protein source—wild-caught feeder fish—are being exploited by overfishing.

For now, the market in America is not fish feed or poultry or hog feed but rather pet food. This initially surprised me. Are pet parents—as many within the industry call them—A-OK with maggot in the dog food bowl? And if pets are eating insect protein, can their parents be far behind? 

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In 2023, InnovaFeed broke ground on a pilot facility in Decatur, Illinois. It is far smaller than the company’s French operation—perhaps a single Piper Cub of maggots per week—with plans to scale up gradually. The French facility is more server farm than insect farm: fattening crates stacked eight high, tended by robots. With the exception of two employees in a control room, the processing of the larvae is automated. The insects’ life cycles are tightly timed, such that an entire generation matures at the same rate. Sensors detect when the grubs have stopped feeding, in preparation for pupation, at which point they’re tipped into funnels that sieve out the frass—to be made into fertilizer—and move the larvae along to be cleaned, killed and processed. It’s about as factory as farming gets. 

The company has a sizable advantage over other “entopreneurs” in that it has partnered with agro-behemoths Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and Cargill. A pipe runs from ADM’s Decatur corn-processing facility directly into the Innovafeed plant, and through that pipe flows the wet corn waste that Innovafeed feeds its larvae. ADM will then purchase the larvae to put into certain brands of the pet food it sells. It’s circular economy on a corporate scale. 

The fact that it’s wet waste is key to both companies’ environmental messaging. The energy it would take to boil until the liquid is gone from thousands of gallons of corn-processing waste—or to truck it hundreds of miles away—would be immense. With this arrangement, neither is needed. 

Innovafeed’s main hurdle in the States is psychological, since it is selling directly to the public rather than to agricultural feed producers. (The company recently announced that it was taking an 18-month break from production in the U.S. to focus on “developing the pet food market for our ingredients.”) Walraven states the obvious: “People are put off by insects.” Innovafeed has developed a label for its partner products that says “Powered by Hilucia.” Hilucia is a portmanteau of Hermetia and illucens—together, the scientific name of the black soldier fly.

Walraven doesn’t see this as deception. People eat pork, not pig, she points out. “There’s a separation between the animal and the ingredient. We felt like it would be helpful to have that separation.” Walraven also feels the naming is justified, given that Innovafeed’s product is unique. “Chicken meal is basically chicken meal,” she says. “Hilucia is not just any BSF. It’s the one we developed, with all the R & D that went into it.” Also, chicken meal doesn’t have its own mascot. Lucia the Hermetia illucens is the only BSF with an Instagram fan base. 

Even with the spruced-up nomenclature, marketing teams have their work cut out. According to the ADM survey “Pet Parent Perceptions of Insect Protein in Pet Food,” just 23 percent of Americans polled said they were likely to feed such a product to their cat or dog. (After the benefits of insect protein were explained, that number rose to more than 30 percent.) Time will tell. 

Dogs themselves appear to have no problem with it. In palatability studies, foods made with BSFL meal and oil performed as well as or better than those made with traditional protein sources. Like black soldier flies, dogs are generally not known to be finicky. 

Their owners can be a different story. Premium products that include “human grade, “hypoallergenic” and even vegan food are among the fastest-growing in the U.S. pet food market. Will pet food brands made with BSFL appeal to humans who don’t eat meat? If they’re avoiding animal products out of concern for the environment, then quite possibly yes. But if it’s out of concern for animal welfare? Hard to say. BSF larvae do not like temperatures above 113 degrees Fahrenheit, and hot water submersion is one method used to kill them. No one is quite sure whether their nervous system is sophisticated enough to feel pain, or whether, instead, the movement is a simple reflex. Insect welfare is one topic being investigated by members (including Innovafeed) of the Center for Insect Biomanufacturing and Innovation. 

More prosaically, dog owners of all stripes will appreciate BSFL’s performance vis à vis the Purina Fecal Scoring Chart. The turds of dogs fed food with either 15 or 30 percent maggot protein averaged between a 2 (“firm but not hard; leaves little or no surface residue when picked up”) and a 3 (“log shaped; leaves surface residue, but holds its form when picked up”), a score considered ideal by the pet food industry. BSFL-based dog food, according to one (company-funded) study, also improves oral health. When dogs were fed a diet of 29.5 percent BSFL protein—which the manufacturer coyly identifies as ProteinX—they had fewer stink-generating bacteria in their dental plaque than when they were fed a diet of poultry byproducts. Their median breath score valuation went from “slight but clearly noticeable” to “barely noticeable”—a nuance arrived at by a panel of dog-breath-sniffing odor judges.

I ask Walraven whether, given the health and environmental benefits of BSFL protein, people, too, will be eating foods that incorporate it. She was, for a time, in charge of Innovafeed’s exploratory efforts in the human food realm, running test kitchens and consumer tasting panels. Dried BSFL meal has a nutty, bitter taste that Walraven likens to unsweetened cocoa powder. She says it tasted great combined with chocolate—say, in a shake or a protein bar, a likely best seller, one would think, given the current mania for all things protein. 

However, it doesn’t taste sufficiently great that Innovafeed is going forward with a product. The company stopped looking into it two years ago. “It’s a big step to go from feeding the dog to feeding yourself,” Walraven says. “For whoever goes first, it’ll be a huge effort in terms of marketing and education.”

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Because of the challenges of competing with corn and soy, Innovafeed has been trying to increase yield by encouraging farmed black soldier flies to mate. Lighting has been shown to make a difference. So might sound. Staff experiment with frequencies, volumes, even vocalists. Black soldier fly reproductive rates are perhaps the last metric wherein Barry White outperforms Beyoncé.

InsectiPro has its own breeding research facility, an airy tent with thousands of adult flies in tall, screened enclosures. (The whole soldier fly life cycle is in here: egg, larva, pupa, adult.) The first thing you notice upon stepping inside (after the smell) is the silence. “They’re a very chill fly,” Huijbers says. Their name makes no sense, as they’re not aggressive. They don’t attack or kill anything, or sting. They are more delicate than houseflies. The lower half of their legs are white, like a schoolgirl’s knee socks. 

In short, the black soldier fly is an unusually appealing fly, possibly a world-changing fly. It makes you wonder, as de Groot says, “how we as humans decided that we associate only bad things with insects. Insects are one of the most important things in this world.” It is insects, along with bacteria and fungi and other of nature’s maligned players, that break things down and create nutrients for plants. Even houseflies, I say. And people just want to kill them.

“These guys are much better than houseflies,” Huijbers says, making the case. They don’t transmit disease, they don’t hover annoyingly around your face, and because they don’t eat, they don’t get all up in your picnic food. 

De Groot nods cheerfully. “We hate houseflies.”