Sustainability as we all know is the need of the hour and with a motto “to produce sustainable food and feed for tomorrow and bringing food waste back into the circular loop” LOOPWORM an organisation founded by IIT-Roorkee alumni Ankit Alok Bagaria (dual degree-Chemical Engineering) and Abhi Gawri (B.Tech-Electrical Engineering) in September 2019, are working to attain these sustainable development goals.
At LOOPWORM they “create an extremely protein-rich diet for fisheries and poultry farms by farming insects to feed them using food waste which currently lands in the landfills.” The working and the actions comprise “converting wet waste or organic waste into rich compost by the help of larvae as we culture them to make rich compost. It takes 12 days to proliferate 3000-4000 times and attain full-growth size. These insects are rich in protein and fat. The composition mainly comprises 40% protein and 35% fat, making them rich source of nutrients for poultry an aquatic animal”.
Ankit and Abhi first met in 2017 at the IIT-Roorkee student chapter of Enactus (Entrepreneurial Action for Us), which promotes university students towards social entrepreneurship. They connected over their shared interest in social entrepreneurship – more specifically waste management. In college, they would end up working on multiple waste management projects.
“That’s where we came across the fact that 50% of waste in India is food waste. Mind you, we are just talking about post-consumer waste (food purchased by a consumer and subsequently not eaten) and doesn’t include pre-consumer food waste from the food processing industry, agri-processing industries, expired food material or food that has gone to waste because of transportation and storage issues,” says Ankit.
What they wanted was to make food waste a positive value resource and bring it back into the food chain or the ‘food loop’. That desire shaped their decision to establish Loopworm.
To date, Loopworm has conceptualised B2B products, including protein concentrate used as a raw material in animal feeds and pet foods, protein powder that serves as a natural diet for animals (fish, turtles, and crustaceans, and for use in poultry, farmed fish, and farmed pig diets for superior growth and meat quality), insect oil (used in animal feed and as a raw material in cosmetic products), and insect frass (plant immunity-enhancing soil additive).
“We aim to process 20 tonnes of food waste daily in a year. In the long run, we envision becoming one of the largest alternative protein companies in India and globally, and producing 300 tonnes of protein by 2023, while utilising 7000 tonnes of food by-products. We foresee a future where insect-based food would be regarded as ‘superfood’ for large scale consumption by humans and animals alike,” explained Ankit.