Top Melbourne restaurants make a flying start on reducing food waste with Bardee larvae

Top restaurants including Gimlet and Supernormal are transforming their food waste into fertiliser and high-protein feed for animals, with the bonus of reducing methane emissions and turning rubbish into a resource. The secret? Fly larvae.

Andrew McConnell's Trader House group has partnered with Bardee, a world-leading start-up based in Sunshine North, which uses the larvae as an unwitting workforce.

Bardee receives 30 tonnes of food waste a day, which is dumped into a squishy pile, sorted, shredded, stacked and inoculated with larvae bred on site.

The larvae poo becomes fertiliser that goes back to farms to grow more food. The larvae themselves become feed for pets and livestock, including chickens. Along the way, the grubs prevent the climate-wrecking methane emissions generated by food decomposition.

Every tonne of food waste processed at Bardee offsets 2520 kilograms of emissions, equivalent to 41 tree seedlings grown for 10 years.

"I've got kids, we want everyone to have a future," says Ben Pollard, group head chef at Trader House. "I am super proud to be part of this. It's so different to when I was an apprentice and we threw everything into the same bin."

Using insects to eat scraps isn't unique, but the high-tech Bardee approach is packed with valuable intellectual property, aimed at transforming waste quickly and efficiently into high-value products.

Starting in a shipping container in 2020, Bardee attracted $7 million in venture capital funding and is on track to build a facility north of Melbourne capable of processing 300 tonnes of food waste a day.

The fertiliser and protein outputs will be abundant, with a container truck able to be filled up every 90 seconds.

The next step for Trader House will be to use ingredients grown with the rich fertiliser from their upcycled scraps.

"We are encouraging farmers that supply us to use this fertiliser, and fish farmers to use the protein as feed," says Pollard. "We are even looking at insect-based dog food to sell at Morning Market."

In the past, a general waste company collected food waste from Trader House's six restaurants and six retail stores and composted it.

Composting is better than sending food waste to landfill but it's slow and labour-intensive, emits methane and doesn't necessarily return nutrients to the soil to grow more food.

Architect Phoebe Gardner and her partner, entomologist Alex Arnold, founded the company after embarking on many domestic experiments in sustainability.

Now they oversee a 2500-square-metre facility filled with neat white labs that look like huge walk-in refrigerators, set at various temperatures and humidity levels to encourage breeding, hatching and munching by larvae, which themselves are primed with prebiotics to eat more.

"Humans cannot keep farming in the same way," says Gardner. "We need to produce 50 to 60 per cent more food to feed the planet and we need to reduce emissions.

"With insects, we can recover nutrients from food waste and put them back into the system in a really tight circle. It's very local, too: food waste from Melbourne is returned to farms that feed Melbourne in the form of fertiliser and protein."