FreezeM is an Agri-Tech company, founded as a spin-off from the Weiznamm Institute of Science, with the vision to become the "seed company" of the insect farming industry. Our mission is to make insect farming simple and accessible to everyone, everywhere by providing breeding solutions to insect farmers worldwide.
Insect protein – a healthy alternative to current feed, which is regulatory approved, has high nutritional values and helps to reduce organic waste. While the benefits are already proven, the challenges are to produce insect protein on an industrial scale and in a stable manner. The first generation of insect protein factories produce the entire supply chain in-house - a complex and costly process that suffers from many problems such as variation in the daily output and colony collapses.
The FreezeM solutions – (1) pausing the life cycle of the Black Soldier Fly (BSF) at the egg stage and (2) the suspended animation of BSF neonates, on an industrial scale, is something that was not feasible before. FreezeM thus enables for the first time the decoupling of the breeding (reproduction) processes from the rearing (larval growing) and processing steps, and therefore creates a new product in the market: ready-to-use suspended BSF neonate with extended shelf-life. Our novel proprietary technologies retain the insects’ traits, allowing them to complete their life cycle and function normally after exiting the preservation state.
This makes FreezeM the equivalent of a seed company in the evolving world of insect farming and doing so it fully aligns with EU Green Deals’ objective “From Farm to Fork” dedicated to ensuring European food is safe, nutritious, and of high quality, produced with minimum impact on nature.
Having confirmed FreezeM’s market acceptance and potential during Phase 1, the focus is now on bringing the technology to TRL 9 during the proposed EIC project. In this scope we envision technology optimizations of the cryopreservation process for BSF eggs and to prolong the suspended animation of BSF neonates, while building a fully operational, at scale production facility to start commercialization.
