Insect Production for the Circular Economy: A Hyperspectral Opportunity

I’m working on phenotyping of insect larvae, focusing on linking biological traits like growth, composition, and health status of our animals to measurable signals.

We are REPLOID. We build scalable production systems based on insects, namely Black Soldier Fly larvae. The core business model is converting low-value organic side streams into high-value protein, lipids, and fertilizer. Profitability depends on consistent quality, process control, and yield optimization. That’s where we see a big opportunity.

We’re looking to integrate hyperspectral imaging to develop non-destructive, high-throughput phenotyping — essentially predicting traits like sex, protein and fat content, growth rates, or stress signals, ideally in real time and potentially inline.

We bring a well-characterized biological system with strong ground-truth data based on expert curation and molecular biology data and chemical analysis. That means we can directly link spectral signatures to validated biological traits.

So, this could be a powerful co-development case for imaging solutions, under realistic agro-industrial conditions. I’m particularly interested in partners who want to test or adapt their systems to that kind of challenges and environment. Ultimately, the goal is to move from sampling-based quality control to continuous, real-time process control.