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Description
BugBox is a green-tech company, that has developed an industrial, efficient and affordable technology to make protein production from crickets sustainable for human food. BugBox’s innovative technology contributes to the mitigation of global threats, such as climate change, famine, excessive usage of resources and the negative impacts of animal farming.
The main goal of the project is to develop a self-learning ICT-platform with sensors, which are the core components of a fully automated mass rearing and production technology for edible insects, enabling to upscale the environmentally responsible production of insect-derived products. As a result, the reactors are expected to be fully managed by an IT-platform. All of the production data will be stored in data warehouse and used for further development and software updating purposes. The production preconditions (temperature level etc.) will be determined for each insect species. Through the self-learning IT-platform, software automatically will regulate the environment inside the reactor based on determined conditions. Also, project results enable all business clients to be able to sell the insect-productions further to solve the pressing problem of increasing demand of nutrition.
Project is implemented in close cooperation with Norwegian company Prediktor Instruments AS, a supplier of advanced analytical instruments for continuous monitoring and control of quality parameters for agriculture and industrial production processes.
Summary of project results
Project addressed a fully-automated technology to mitigate global threats concerning food i.e. to enable the production of animal proteins permanently sustainable and thereby improve our living environment, tackle with climate change and reduce ecological footprint of common farming.
Project activities were targeted on developing components for the fully-automated edible insect mass rearing and production technology, including software architecture, requirements for additional hardware and software sensor technologies, testing and integration of the sensors of the Norwegian partner. Prediktor Instruments’ contribution into the project was the development of a sensor system for continuous monitoring and control of the input qualities of the feed, different types of biomasses – as well as output qualities (e.g material composition of powders). The sensors are based on Near InfraRed Spectroscopy (NIRS), which is a well-known technology and used in laboratories for several decades as a fast method for measurements of product composition (fat, protein, sugar and dry materials) in food- and feed ingredients. Applied for online instrumentation, existing solutions have the challenges of high unit costs and highly manual procedures for commissioning and calibration.
All planned activities were implemented, including the software development, requirements for additional hardware and software sensor technologies, testing and improvements. In addition, Project Promoter has participated in the development of legislation related to Estonian edible insects in cooperation with the Estonian Insect Industry Union (read more at https://bugpro.org/seadusandlus/).
Advances in the development of artificial intelligence over the last decade or so have made it possible to process "smart" big data. In this way, today it is possible to quickly analyze a large number of insect growth parameters and find interdependencies and correlations between data series. This, in turn, makes it possible to optimize the production price and accelerate the growth of insects.
In the course of the project, it was possible to develop software to collect real-time cricket life cycle data, which already has support based on various data mining, analysis and artificial intelligence (AI) to working algorithms, which, in turn, allows for quick answers to the questions "what to change in the reactor parameters to speed up growth", "is the growth cycle going normally", etc., if there is a sufficient amount of data. Work in this area will continue in the following years.
Both ICT and technological solutions are planned to be patented. In cooperation with the Food and Fermentation Technology Development Center, the company has developed the first trial batch of breakfast crackers with insect flour. In the future, there are also plans to launch other products.
Summary of bilateral results
Although the cooperation with the Norwegian partner Prediktor Instruments was considered successful, the Norwegian partner does not have an active business activity now, therefore the cooperation is not likely to continue.