Green Matters has teamed up with WeWork for the month of April to celebrate Earth Day 2018 with a #workgreen challenge and Q&A series spotlighting sustainability-minded WeWork member companies. In this installment, we’re sitting down with Robert Olivier, founder and CEO of GrubTubs. Olivier has spent the last 17 years developing insect-based technologies; and GrubTubs stands to be his pinnacle achievement.
Company name: GrubTubs
Location: Austin, TX (with plans to expand to Dallas or San Antonio next!)
What they do: GrubTubs turns food scraps from restaurants into affordable, sustainable animal feed for local farms. To accomplish this, the company employs the help of protein-rich insect larvae called grubs, which consume food waste and are then fed to chickens and pigs at a fraction of the cost of commercial animal feed.
Why GrubTubs is so valuable: Animal feed is the number-one expense in agriculture, and far from sustainable. Around 70 percent of the farm acreage in the US is used to grow grains for animal feed that could be used for other purposes. GrubTubs alleviates the need for grain-based feeds for chickens and pigs, while simultaneously keeping food waste out of landfills. Restaurants, farmers, consumers and the environment all benefit.
GREEN MATTERS: What part of GrubTub’s work are you most excited about?
The amount of food we can recover from restaurants.
Typically for a bigger restaurant, the food gets so stinky it has to go every day into a dumpster. But because of GrubTubs, there’s no odor or pests. So it can be picked up when it’s full, or once a week. That’s how we’re saving this restaurant on its landfill costs.
In the old system, companies had no incentive to recycle because a landfill company would say, “Hey, I have to be here every day or every other day anyway, and you have x cubic feet [in this dumpster], so just throw it in there.”
If we can knock the frequency down, we have just dethroned the lord of trash. Food is the bottleneck keeping the landfill guys in business.
We charge by weight. We incentivize everyone to get as much weight out of the landfill as they can. A lot of people don’t realize how much food they have by weight… The point is that they start realizing that if all their food goes to GrubTubs, they don’t have to pay as much for landfill trash. Eventually, we increase our service as they decrease landfill service.
What was the piece of your backstory that inspired you to create this particular business model?
I understood the insect part a long time ago. But what I tell people is that in order to industrialize an insect, the insect doesn’t need us. If I walk in the forest, the honeybees are perfectly fine building a beehive in a tree. But people make beehives because man wants to interact with insects in such a way that it’s easy to get to the honey.
The trick wasn’t the insect. It was finding the right beehive to work with the humans.
I have a degree in environmental science and finance. If you want to change business, you must understand the ways of business. Why protest and chain yourself to trees if you can change agriculture, making it economically feasible to not cut down the trees?
Since I was 14, it was all about learning business, learning the environment, and connecting them.
If American farmers can be sustainable again in the broadest sense: If they can respect and feed their animals, have happier animals, and feed families, that’s sustainable too. And that has preoccupied me for a long time.
How long does it take for the grubs to hatch?
GrubTubs is different because there are lots of people who can grow insects in trays, which takes about two weeks.
What I figured out was a “continuous-flow reactor” – a way to put baby insects in every day, and take mature ones out so that the reactor doesn’t stop for about six months at a time. Instead of managing hundreds of trays, all you really need is a really big reactor.
Here’s the crazy thing about these grubs. These grubs are what chickens eat. If you put a chicken in a soy field, it eats grubs in the ground. When we use soy and corn (mostly GMO-produced in this country) to feed chickens, it’s made to look like a grub with that feed pellet. Nature designed grubs as grubs for a reason. Feed pellets imitate grubs. We realized, why create a pellet when we already have a grub?
The only problem with that method is grubs don’t have a shelf life. They don’t store. So we came up with the GrubTub as a way to store nutrients. They can be placed on a farm for two to three weeks as a nutrient battery. When a farmer is ready is ready to go put it in the process, that’s when the grubs come out.
The farmer just looks and says, “OK, I have so many chickens so I’m going to put more grubs in and more food waste in.”
We stockpile the food, not the feed, at the farm. Then it’s up to the farmer to make his own feed.
GrubTubs Turns Restaurant Waste Into Nutrient-Dense Animal Feed [Green Matters]