Case Presentation of Large-Scale Production of Black Soldier Fly Larvae

A ground breaking technology JMGreen developed was the food waste preserving technique using probiotics. During the day to day operation, the biggest challenge we faced was the inconsistent food waste amount coming in the facility everyday. With the designed handling capacity of 200 tons per day (believe or not, it's not even covering a district of Beijing), the variation of actual collection is huge! Some days the site can only collect 50 tons, and the following day there will be over 200 tons. It won't be wise to keep the colony at 200 tons level as they might not be getting enough food for the larvae for the most time, but they can't keep it too low as if there were too many food waste came in, they don't have enough larvae for the food, and the food will rot if not being processed in a timely manner.  So creating a buffer between waste collection and larval production is a critical segment in the flow design. Now they have created a bank of food waste, sitting there ready for use for feeding, depending on what's needed for the larval stock.

Like running any factories, labor cost is the biggest concern comes down to operation, and this factory, thanks for the automation JM Green developed, only have 6 labors plus 2 floor managers. All machines in this factory are custom made to fit the local situation of Beijing, for example, the complex contamination of the waste (plastic bags, broken glass, even false teeth, etc.). The automation level is still improving.

Auto unloader of the fermented food waste

The fermentation process separates solid and water, so an extra blending is necessary to provide the consistency before feeding

Each pellet holds 40 pans and can digest 800kg food waste within 10 days. The objective of this factory is to digest as many food waste as possible, not to produce as many larvae as possible, so the growing time is longer than 5 days.

Auto feeding machine can feed 40 pans within 2 minutes, with only one labor needed. A key technology in this machine is it employs a part to remove hard stuff like metals, avoiding the damage to the machine if they got stuck.

As you can imagine, the loaded pans are very heavy, so we developed this auto unloader to collect the larvae and frass, which thereafter being sent into sifter. This operation position used to require 4 labor to operation before the flipping machine, now requires only 1.

This location uses a rotating screener of 4mm mesh, specifically designed for harvesting 0.1g BSFL. The giant tower beside is a blowing tunnel, it blows away all the big/light pieces stuff like residue plastic, cigarettes.