Insect Farming: ABB Robots for Larvae Crates

Insect farming turns fly and beetle larvae into protein for fish, poultry, pigs and pets, and much of the daily work is moving boxes. Larvae grow in crates that have to be filled with feed, stacked, checked, tipped out and stacked again. This post starts with mealworms kept in tubs of bran and with compost bins that let grubs crawl out on their own. It then moves to the first industrial fly plants and to the robot arms that now lift larvae crates in London and in South Korea, and it ends with the costs and failures that will decide how many robots the industry can pay for.

An adult black soldier fly, Hermetia illucens. Its larvae are farmed for animal feed. Photo: Vengolis / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From bran tubs and grub bins to the first fly factories

The small farms that supply pet shops and anglers show how the job is done by hand. Mealworms, the larvae of the beetle Tenebrio molitor, are easy to rear on oats, wheat bran or grain, with a slice of potato, carrot or apple for moisture, and they are still sold in containers of bran or oatmeal. Keepers feed them to reptiles, fish, birds and small mammals, and anglers use them as bait. Crickets are farmed for the same buyers. In traditional insect breeding, workers checked the size, colour and movement of the insects themselves and picked out sick or dead ones by eye.

People inspect a handful of fly larvae from a barrel at a commercial maggot farm in Zambia that raises protein for animal feed. Photo: Hydrotechfarmszambia / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The black soldier fly made bigger farms possible, because its larvae can be raised on many kinds of organic waste. D. Craig Sheppard developed the larvae as a feeder insect for exotic pets, and in 2006 Phoenix Worms became the first feeder insect with a registered US trademark. The fly also came with a way to harvest that needs no machine. When the larvae reach the prepupal stage they migrate away from their food, so grub composting bins have ramps or holes in their sides and the prepupae climb out by themselves. The harvested pupae and prepupae are eaten by poultry, fish, pigs, lizards, turtles and even dogs.

Black soldier fly larvae feeding on pieces of yam. Photo: Zenyrgarden / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

In the European Union, seven insect species have been allowed in fish feed since 1 July 2017, and insect protein was approved for poultry and pig feed in 2021. Between those dates, on 11 June 2019, King Willem-Alexander opened Protix's 14,000 square metre plant in Bergen op Zoom in the Netherlands. The EUR 45 million plant was the world's largest insect protein facility, according to Bühler, which worked on the project. Founder Kees Aarts spoke of a "fully automated processing solution". In 2022 Civil Eats described the plant as "staffed by more robots than people", with thousands of columns of green crates more than 12 feet high.

Fish feed pellets. The EU has allowed protein from seven insect species in fish feed since 1 July 2017. Photo: Narek75 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Robot arms lifting larvae crates in London and Chuncheon

South Korea opened a plant of this kind in September. On 8 September 2026 the Gangwon-Chuncheon Insect Industry Hub Complex was completed in Chuncheon, a 20 billion won (about $15 million) project whose smart factory farm can produce up to 1,000 tons of mealworms a year. When the Chosun Ilbo visited on 29 September, hundreds of breeding boxes were stacked in the hall and robot arms were lifting and moving them, with no workers in sight. Cameras running vision AI from LG CNS measured the larvae in each box and logged average lengths such as 24.9 mm and 32.1 mm. The system uses that data to decide when a box moves on to the next room.

Mealworms, the larvae of Tenebrio molitor, the insect raised at the Chuncheon smart factory farm. Photo: Fvukajlovic / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

An ABB arm already works in one insect farm. Under the railway arches near London Bridge station, Entocycle runs a Centre for Insect Technology, and LAC Logistics Automation built its crate line around an ABB IRB 4600 six-axis robot, Automate UK reported in August 2024. Its stainless steel and anodised aluminium arm meets food hygiene rules and uses different grippers for small nursery crates and larger adult crates. It depalletises 16 clean nursery crates, a weighing module adds 0.5 kg of feed to each, and a camera counts the larvae eggs. Later the robot tips each nursery crate into a bigger one and stacks the full crates on pallets. At harvest it tips them through a funnel toward a shaker that separates insects from waste.

An ABB IRB 4600, the robot model in Entocycle's crate line, here in the Orora Fresh Packaging cell that stacks produce trays in Kingsville, Canada. Photo: ABB

Most of that work is crate handling, which ABB's standard robots already do in food and packaging plants, so a wider role is a real possibility. We found no other ABB insect farm project, though. ABB describes the IRB 4600 as a general purpose robot for compact, high-density cells, which matters under low arches. Its IRB 660 is a four-axis palletizer with a 3.15 metre reach and a 250 kg payload that ABB calls ideal for palletizing bags, boxes and crates, and it is programmed with ABB's PickMaster software. Between climate rooms, a Flexley Mover AMR could carry pallets of crates; ABB says the Visual SLAM version positions itself to within 10 mm and makes its own maps. Cells like these are usually planned first in RobotStudio.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizer stacking cartons onto pallets at the end of a packaging line. Photo: ABB

What insect farms need from robots next

Bigger plants mean more crates to move. In a white paper reported by Food Ingredients First on 28 September 2026, the competitors Innovafeed and Protix argued that scale cuts both cost and carbon. Innovafeed said it had raised its output tenfold in three years and cut production costs sevenfold, and that its carbon intensity had fallen fivefold since 2022. At Nesle in France it uses heat from existing industrial sources. Its chief business officer, Maye Walraven, put global insect meal supply at more than 15,000 metric tons and said the ingredients now meet the bar for aquaculture and pet food. Fish feed links this industry to the fish farming robots we covered earlier.

An ABB Flexley Mover P603 carrying crates. Photo: ABB

Cost is still the biggest problem. Insect feed has been estimated at two to ten times the price of fish meal or soybean meal, and farms have to be heated to around 25 to 30 °C. Several big players have failed. Ynsect, the French mealworm company founded in 2011, attracted about €600 million in investment and planned a 45,000 square metre vertical farm near Amiens, but a court ordered its liquidation on 1 December 2025. Enorm Biofactory, the largest insect farm in Northern Europe, went bankrupt in November 2025. The larvae are hard on machines too: in Ynsect's plants, the very fatty mealworms clogged machinery.

Ynsect co-founder Jean-Gabriel Levon holds up a dish of mealworms in front of the company logo, 2015. Photo: Ecole polytechnique / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Policy is pushing the other way. In October 2026 the industry group IPIFF welcomed an EU Protein Action Plan that targets 35 percent EU-sourced high-protein feed by 2035 and names insect protein as a circular feed source. At home, mealworm tubs and grub bins will stay manual, but large farms are likely to look more like Chuncheon, with robots doing the heavy crate work, cameras measuring growth and staff watching from a control room. Welfare is an open question too, since it is uncertain whether insects can feel pain. The Chuncheon centre's director, Seok Yeong-sik, said the next step is for the AI to control the equipment directly, and that the centre will look at turning droppings and shed skins into fertiliser.

Cricket Shelter, a modular edible insect farm designed by Terreform ONE, on show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2020. Photo: Mary Mark Ockerbloom / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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