Sagar Shah

Since 2014, $2B of investment has flowed into insect farming. Investment flows were growing rapidly prior to 2021, but have since slowed. Investor sentiment has been rocked by high profile failures. Taking into account recent developments, we built a model projecting future production capacity. Our model points to much lower production volumes than many high-profile industry forecasts, leading us to believe the industry forecasts may be overly optimistic.

Researcher Sagar Shah estimated how cost effective farmed fish slaughter commitments from retailers might be in Europe. His research focused on France, Italy, and Spain because of the large scale of consumption of farmed fish species that don’t benefit from stunning in these countries.

Senior Researcher Sagar Shah and Senior Research Manager Jacob Peacock conducted a preregistered reanalysis of data from a series of hypothetical discrete choice experiments from Brachem et al. (2019). They explored how meat-free meal selection correlated with the number of meat-free options and the availability of options containing fish/poultry meat or meat-analogues.

We investigated costs of production at four of the largest BSFL producers to better understand the prospects of them making major inroads into the aquatic animal feed market. We found production costs at these firms will most likely be too high to displace fishmeal. We therefore anticipate a smaller BSFL sector focused on high-value market segments rather than bulk feed commodities.

We produced rough-and-ready forecasts of the number of animals farmed in 2033 with the aim of helping advocates and funders with prioritization decisions. We focus on the most numerous groups of farmed animals: broiler chickens, finfishes, shrimps, and select insect species (black soldier fly larvae and mealworms).