Meet the 3.0 Finalists: Flybox (UK)

Food waste is one of the biggest untapped resources in our economy. At Flybox, we use insects to turn that waste back into food, creating a circular system that keeps nutrients in use instead of burning or burying them. 

Most organic waste management today still follows a straight line. Food enters the economy and leaves it as emissions or landfill. Insect waste management breaks that pattern. Organic waste is prepared, fed to insects in a controlled environment and converted into two valuable outputs: protein and fertilizer. Food waste becomes food again. There is no other organic waste solution that can genuinely claim that level of circularity. 

This approach is also significantly lower-emissions. Treating organic waste with insects produces around 50 percent less CO₂ per ton of food waste than biogas, the most widely used alternative. Circularity and climate impact are built into the system, not added as an afterthought. 

I first became interested in this problem while studying waste management at university. Growing up across South Africa, Kenya and Côte d’Ivoire, I had seen how organic waste accumulates and affects communities. When I came across insect bioconversion in 2012, it stood out because it offered something rare: a solution that made economic sense while addressing a real environmental problem. That idea stayed with me, and it became the foundation for Flybox. 

From the beginning, we focused on making the technology practical. Much of what existed in the insect farming space was either DIY and unreliable, or over-engineered and poorly suited to lower-infrastructure settings. We designed Flybox systems to be robust, standardized and easy to deploy. Our container farms can operate off-grid and are well suited to arid climates. More recently, we have developed our Flybox polytunnel range, a simpler and lower-cost system that we believe can make insect waste management viable at much larger scale. 

The UAE is a particularly strong fit. Waste-to-energy struggles to compete with local energy economics, while food security remains a priority in a country that imports much of what it consumes. Insect waste management turns organic waste back into food locally and can be deployed close to where that waste is generated. 

Through the FoodTech Challenge, we aim to launch our first operational site in the UAE alongside academic and waste management partners, while rolling out polytunnel deployments in the Global South. Our focus is on proving that circular organic waste management can work in the real world, at scale, and in places where it is needed most. 

Larry Kotch

CEO of Flybox