Nutrient Recapture

The breadbasket of the world, the abundance of high-quality nutrition means that 1 in every 13 wasted meals come from Southeast Asia. This equates to over 47 million tonnes of nutrition that's just discarded, while over 350 million people go hungry in the Asia-Pacific - that's over half the world's hungry people. The carbon footprint of that waste is estimated to be 250 million tonnes of Co2-equivalents per annum and is growing every year; SEAsian food consumption has grown by over 300% since 1969. 

The climate impact of nutrients escaping the food system is only exacerbated by the rising middle class, which is making each meal more meaty. The climate impacts of producing meat are well-documented; the overwhelming majority of protein fed to farmed animals comes from fish or soy. Every 1 ton of feed-protein produces approximately as much carbon as 7 tons of coal. 

SEAsia doesn't farm much soy, but is home to the fish-rich gulf of Thailand, where a fishing industry oversees a humanitarian and ecological disaster; trawling the ocean floor (which is the world's biggest carbon sink) with a workforce largely comprised of slaves. 

As with all cases of overfishing, the Gulf of Thailand is yielding less and less fish, which is threatening food security in the region and beyond. 

All these factors pose an existential threat to the global blue economy, as SEAsia is responsible for most of the world's aquaculture production (88% of all aquaculture is performed in Asia). 

If you're one of the billions of people that enjoy eating fish and crustacea, chances are it's come to you through a complex web of environmental destruction and forced labour. 

As the cherry on the cake, statistically, you'll only eat two-thirds of that shrimp roll; putting lives of humans, animals and plants to waste. 

It's a colossal, wide-reaching problem that operators in SEAsia are uniquely poised to tackle. 

Full Circle is the first company to combine two proven technologies: solid-state fermentation and black soldier fly production. This innovative approach has some key advantages:

1. Carbon . Due to Full Circle's unique processing capabilities, the product is ultra-low carbon. Though a full LCA has not been conducted, using LCAs of other fermentation and BSF products we can estimate a max carbon footprint of about 100kg Co2-eq per ton of product (soymeal is about 7,000). During a 6 month carbon-sensor pilot in 2023, data showed that 42% of the time, Full Circle's process was actually absorbing carbon. This is the closest any company has got to carbon-negative feed protein outside of the lab according to publicly accessible data. 
2. Cost. Full Circle's technology results in a far greater yield than other waste-to-feed technologies; allowing us to reach price-parity with commodities like fishmeal without needing massive economy-of-scale. 
3. Functionality. Our product contains prebiotic and postbiotic compounds, as well as probiotic bacteria. We need a larger R&D budget to get metrics on how well these work, but initial signs are very promising and are showing better growth performance even than the highest-quality fishmeal.
4. Consistency. Consistent product quality is crucial for any business, let alone for feed. Because Nutrient Recapture relies on an ecosystem of species, the product quality seems to be more consistent than with traditional black soldier fly meal. That’s because with an ecosystem, another species is present to ‘fill the gaps’ if one species is faltering. 
5. Flexibility. Nutrient Recapture isn’t limited to protein and carbohydrate ratios like Black Soldier Fly production and many forms of fermentation. That opens up the tech to a wide stream of raw materials, as well as a tremendous protein range (12-to-71% has been proven so far). 
6. Protein.
   1. Protein Content. Most black soldier fly companies have a maximum protein content of 55%, although some are able to reach 60%. Standard fishmeal is 65% protein, but…
   2. Real Protein. When protein content is measured, it measures nitrogen, so picks up ammonia, chitin and other non-proteinous compounds as protein. When this has been measured in black soldier fly meal, the results aren’t good, probably largely due to chitin. A 65% crude protein black soldier fly meal will only contain about 47% real protein, the same as decent soy meal. Full Circle’s Nutrient Recapture not only facilitates a product of up to 70% protein, the same as super prime fishmeal, but because of the fermentation, it contains a very low amount of Non-Protein Nitrogen, only 1-2%.  
7. Amino Acids. Another quality measurement for protein products is the amino acid profile. If you take the ideal amino profile for a broad range of species, from cows to rainbow trout, and compare each species with Full Circle’s product, fishmeal and black soldier fly meal, Full Circle’s product is the closest on average to all species’ requirements; a truly species-agnostic protein.

In short, Full Circle's solution allows the transformation of waste into a low-carbon, highly nutritious ingredient.

Did you know that the last fish taco you ate probably made you complicit in some of the most extreme humanitarian and environmental crimes possible? If you eat seafood, you are underserved by the industry. Even if seafood is not a part of your diet, you and your community are already being impacted by climate change. 

But chances are you're far more insulated than the people we interact with every day. According to the FAO, most of the world's aquaculture is done by smallholder farmers in Southeast Asia. Southeast Asian smallholder farmers are diligent and hard-working people who are so regularly battered by the renowned volatility of the blue and agricultural economies that their highest priority is securing their end-of-month income to feed their families and maintain their dignity. One of our customers feed costs are 64 baht per kg of meat he produces; currently the market price per kilo is 65 baht. He's a small farmer making $0.03 per kg of meat he produces. 

The farmers we serve aren't in a position to care about the environmental and humanitarian ramifications of the supply chain they enable. They will only choose a sustainable option if they know it won't have any negative financial impact on their lives. We operate in Thailand, where the negative karma associated with enabling harmful practices can cause stress and upset to farmers who are informed about their supply chains. 

That's why our solution is so important - by pricing equal to the widely available but destructive protein commodities (starting with fishmeal), as well as offering high-quality functionality, we are able to give feed-manufacturers a sensible, affordable alternative that allows them to change the entire downstream supply-chain for the better. 

It means farmers can feed their communities and their families without worrying about how their decisions might impact their children and grandchildren, or damage their prospects of a positive reincarnation. 

Tae Boonra comes from the agricultural province of Nakhon Ratchasima in Thailand, a province known for its meat and plant production. While some of his friends and family contribute to the provinces' farmed output, he studied Sustainable Engineering in order to help with managing the tremendous quantities of agricultural waste that you used to be able to see everywhere when driving around. After his studies he immersed himself in the local biogas industry, engaging with farmers, processors and local villagers to find solutions for organic waste issues. 

Felix Collins  was born six thousand miles from Tae in London. He grew up in a community that has ranked sustainability as an increasingly key issue for the past 30 years. Despite being relatively well-informed, it's a community that will still be the end-users that destructive supply-chains serve. The reasons for this are complex, but to properly engage with the problem at source in SEAsia, it's important to have a good understanding of the factors influencing its demand. 

The Full Circle team has 15 people on it and everyone bar Felix is Thai. As a result almost all of them have some very real experience with agricultural or aquacultural communities, which are an important part of the wider fabric of society in Thailand. For example, Khun Kim (our sales chief) spent 20 years travelling up and down Thailand selling agricultural oils to many different stakeholders. Khun Pin, our program manager, has best friends from school that are shrimp farmers. Khun Dtoon, one of our insect farmers, used to sell his own fish. We are deeply enmeshed with the communities that we serve. 

We've established a facility just outside Bangkok that has a capacity of 25 tons of protein per month. 

We've piloted our product with over 60 different stakeholders across different agricultural and aquacultural businesses. We have received tremendous feedback, including excellent performance results when compared to fishmeal. In whiteleg shrimp, just 3% of our product increased weight gain by 17%. In tilapia, we successfully replaced 50% of super prime fishmeal with no negative effects. We've tested in the lab and the field and are now gearing up for commercialisation. 

Our 6 month carbon pilot monitoring Co2 levels before and after our biological processing revealed that 42% of the time our bioprocesses are net absorbing carbon dioxide from the air. 

We have achieved protein contents ranging from 15% to 71%, a remarkable flexibility. We have tested about 25 different waste streams with our technology. We have conducted interviews with the communities we are serving and completed physical tours meeting and speaking with farmers across the country. We completed our pre-seed round in late 2022. 

As we are beginning commercialisation we would be very grateful for support in this process, guiding us how we navigate what's quite a complex market to fuel our sales and allow us to prove to investors that the commercial potential of our company justifies deploying our solution at scale. 

We would also appreciate support on best-practices for small companies that have products so innovative that a lot of regulations simply don't cover them. DIY lobbying and more would be great to learn about. 

Learning best practices for sourcing talent would also be great!

Full Circle's Nutrient Recapture technology introduces a new and highly efficient approach to sustainable feed production, with very clear differences compared to other alt proteins and waste-to-protein systems. Unlike conventional insect or bacterial meal production that primarily focuses on extracting specific nutrients, our technology makes use of the entire waste stream. This involves using multi-species solid-state fermentation, a gravely under-researched and under-funded approach; along with black soldier fly larvae

Innovation and Enhanced Approach: Our method does not merely extract; it recaptures and revalorises all available nutrients, resulting in a yield of 33 kg from every 100 kg of input—substantially higher than the 2-7 kg typical of existing extraction technologies. This dramatically improved efficiency means we can offer a competitive and sustainable alternative to traditional feeds like fishmeal, at much lower costs than competitors due to higher output from the same nutrient stream.

Changing the Market

By demonstrating such a high-efficiency rate, we set a new benchmark for resource utilisation in feed production.  encouraging other companies to explore and adopt similar nutrient recapture technologies. To quote Tony Crosbie, a leading figure in black soldier fly sales: I want to congratulate you both on making an exceptional product, milled to perfection and with a very impressive analysis profile. I have 6 years experience of working in the insect industry at a commercial level and your product sets a new standard that other companies will have difficulty competing with, as things are. The protein meal is perfectly milled, has a sublime, silky quality and I love the smell too! The colour is towards the lighter spectrum which will suit buyers for all applications, pet food manufacturing and aqua feed included. I will be recommending your product to buyers without hesitation and I am happy for you to quote me on this.

Changing the Landscape

1. Disruption of Conventional Feed Markets: With a product offering up to 70% protein content and superior amino acid profiles compared to traditional feeds, Full Circle's product offers something highly disruptive. Our technology provides a viable, high-quality alternative to fishmeal, which could shift market preferences and reduce reliance on environmentally damaging feed sources.
2. Regulatory Influence: The innovative nature of our multi-species fermentation process, especially within strict regulatory environments like the EU, may necessitate adaptations in regulatory frameworks to accommodate such advanced technologies. Successful market penetration and demonstrated safety and efficacy can lead to regulatory evolution that supports innovative feed solutions.
3. Enhancement of Food Security: By increasing the efficiency of converting food waste into high-quality feed, our technology can significantly contribute to global food security. This is particularly crucial in regions with limited access to sustainable feedstock, helping to mitigate the impact of feed shortages and reducing dependency on imported feeds.
4. Showing that carbon-negative protein is possible and real. By demonstrating that it's possible to make ultra-low carbon protein that's actually cost-effective for real-life consumers. 

• We are addressing the need for sustainable animal feed protein at an affordable price-point. 
• We plan to solve it by making an affordable animal feed protein source that has insanely low carbon emissions. 
• The impact we want to make is to cut carbon emissions from the feed industry.

Inputs-to-Impact Logic

• We take agricultural waste as an input, apply our unique processes, as well as labour to it, and receive ultra-low carbon feed protein as an output. The outcome of this is that waste is prevented from biogas, composting or just being sent to landfill. The impact of this is making supply chains less pollutive; making food supply chains more resilient; and reducing carbon footprints of waste streams. 
• We then take that product as an input, sell it as an activity and get the cash needed to maintain and grow our operations as an output. The outcomes of this are reducing demand for fishmeal, the impact of which is reduced destruction of marine environments; reduced carbon footprints of foods, communities and societies and reducing the market for forced labour in gulf of Thailand fishing operations. 

1. Transform protein from a net carbon producer to a zero-carbon ingredient. We are measuring this goal through carbon-sensor testing of our process with different product iterations. Our gold-standard indicator of this is the amount of time that our carbon sensors record carbon absorption. 
2. Replace destructive proteins like fishmeal and soymeal. We are measuring this through a classification of customers: are they using our ingredient to replace either fishmeal or soymeal? If yes, then we record the tonnage that we have sold to customers in that category as a metric of replacement. 
3. Biomass loss averted - fish saved. This is calculated using average weight of the junk fish that are used for fishmeal and information about products sold to customers that we know are using our ingredient to replace fishmeal. 
4. Food waste reduced - simply the weight of the food waste that we repurpose and reintroduce into the food system
5. Biomass waste reduced - we request data from customers about their farmed animal mortality using our product compared to their previous experiences, so we can record and calculate how our product is helping to increase survivability. 

When nutrients have escaped the food system (e.g. as waste at any point in the food supply chain), there are a few ways to recover them and avoid completely wasting the resources that went into their production. 

1. Compost them - this is the most wasteful recovery method, as it reintroduces nutrients right at the bottom of the food chain (the lowest trophic level).

2. Extract useful bits - typical Black Soldier Fly production fits into this recovery method. It involves using a process (mechanical, chemical or biological) to extract desirable components from waste streams. This can be much more effective than composting as desired compounds can be reintroduced higher up the food chain. However, it often involves significant waste streams or byproducts, which tend to go towards composting. 

3. Recapture them - this involves recapturing the entire nutrient stream and processing them into a suitable product to be reintroduced at a higher trophic level. This method is the least wasteful. 

Full Circle pioneers nutrient recapture, using a combination of two ancient technologies: solid-state fermentation and insect rearing. 

Multi-species solid-state fermentation is an extremely old technology but it is very poorly researched, with most of the research coming from Chinese scientists studying traditional fermented foods. Full Circle takes this concept, but instead creates an ecosystem of over 10 different bacteria and fungi that all work together to transform waste products into high-quality, sterile nutrition. We then introduce black soldier fly larvae into the mix, which operate similarly to microbes in terms of breaking down undesirable compounds and then building them back up into desirable compounds like amino acids and anti-microbial peptides. 

Full Circle’s product is similar to insect meal and does contain insects, but insects are instead used as a tool to facilitate nutrient recapture, as opposed to the target for extraction. Full Circle recaptures nutrients through a few methods and black soldier fly larvae are just one tool in our arsenal. The use of so many different species has a powerful impact on consistency, as ecosystems create a robustness even with different substrates. 

The specific details are currently kept as trade secret until we achieve scale, but Full Circle’s final product is a combination of protein from fermentation (including both bacterial and fungal protein) and protein from black soldier fly larvae. 

Full-Time: 11

Part-time: 6

7 years

Model

Our model is a very simple manufacturing model. We secure input (agricultural or industrial 'pre-retail' food waste streams), which has a cost. We then biologically process this input, which has a labour and materials cost. Then we dry and mill the resulting raw material, which has an energy cost. We then sell our product for more than was spent on it but less than competitors. 

The cost of securing raw material is our largest cost, with processing coming second and labour coming third. 

It's a clear value proposition: a protein that does everything that normal high-quality proteins can do, but has additional features like a very low carbon footprint and additional functional benefits - all for the same cost! 

Customers

Customers are segregated by volume, both are reached through agents. 

Pilot

With just 25 tons per month on offer, at Pilot stage we are locked out from servicing almost all fishmeal customers. Instead we have to look at the customers that are already purchasing alt. protein like BSF meal at small quantities; these include niche farms and exotic pet enterprises. We do sell to some farms directly, but it's difficult to find suitable candidates at this volume.

Scale

Once we reach a minimum of 100 tons of product per month, we'll unlock the customers that will allow us to make significant impact - the big fishmeal consumers: feed-mills. 

Beneficiaries

Besides our customers, indirect beneficiaries include the end-users (the animals), which benefit from high-quality, digestible protein. When we replace fishmeal or soymeal consistently at a large enough scale, the beneficiaries will include everyone on earth, but especially the communities most vulnerable to climate change, overfishing and deforestation. 

Partners

Partners are an important part of our lean model. We partner with firms that provide black soldier fly eggs and microbial powders, which means we don't have to worry about breeding and propagation. We also partner with processors for drying and milling, meaning we don't need to invest in heavy machinery.

Impact

After a full LCA is completed, we will have a very accurate idea of how much carbon we are saving, both by preventing waste from going to landfill and by replacing high-carbon feed ingredients. It's more difficult to measure direct impact on the humanitarian crisis in the Gulf of Thailand, but by measuring replacement of fishmeal over time we will be able to measure our contribution to the reduction of demand. 

Our model is a simple manufacturing model where we price at a level where we can make enough of a profit to maintain operations and reinvest in building the scale of the company. We already have had customers pay for our product across various industries including swine and even a marsupial treat company. We have soft-contracts with large companies for over $6m annualised revenue, we just need a big enough scale to access them!