Finnish startup Volare has switched on its first full-scale insect protein factory, a €15M plant in the west-coast city of Pori that turns food-industry leftovers into feed for fish and pets.
Although the factory is still ramping up, Skretting, which Volare describes as the world’s largest salmon feed maker, has already signed a binding contract for its protein. A large chemical company, which Volare has not named, will take the oil, and an unnamed pet food maker has signed a preliminary agreement.
Alongside those deals, Volare has raised €7.18M towards its next plant through a share issue that closed on 2 September. About €6.18M came from investors on the Finnish investment platform Springvest, with the remaining €1M raised through a private placement. The issue valued the company at about €63.8M before the new money came in.
Maki.vc, the Helsinki venture firm that has backed Volare since 2021, has also committed to investing about €1M more in stages, while London’s Firstminute Capital is listed among the company’s significant investors.
Inside The Pori Factory
Volare built the factory inside a former newspaper printing house, which the company says saved both time and money. What goes in is what food makers have left over: by-products of cereal processing and sugar making, and grain that falls short of food quality standards, according to the company’s Springvest press release, published in Finnish.
Those leftovers feed black soldier fly larvae, which Volare says grow to about 10,000 times their body weight in a couple of weeks. The grown larvae are then processed into protein meal, oil and an ingredient for organic fertiliser.
The protein is sold as an alternative to fishmeal. The oil is rich in lauric acid, the same fat found in palm kernel and coconut oil, and Volare says it can replace both.
Running at full capacity, the plant is designed to produce up to 5,000 tonnes of protein and 2,000 tonnes of oil a year, roughly 1,000 times the protein output of Volare’s earlier demonstration plant. The whole process runs on electricity, and chief executive Jarna Hyvönen says a crew of four can operate the factory.
Until now, Volare’s output has been far smaller: last year the company said its protein was being used in Alvar Pet dog treats, in cat food under Vafo’s Dagsmark brand, in a trial batch of rainbow trout feed made with Alltech Fennoaqua and on an organic chicken farm.
A Second, Bigger Plant
The new money is meant to speed up Volare 02, a second factory the company aims to start building in 2027. In the Finnish release, Hyvönen gave an early estimate that it could be about five times the size of Pori, producing 20,000 to 30,000 tonnes of protein a year.
In the longer run, Volare wants to put its plants next to the companies that supply its raw material. Its website puts the amount of food-industry leftovers produced across the European Union (EU) at about 90 million tonnes a year.
Hyvönen also said Volare aims to turn a profit next year, about six years after it was founded, adding that rivals have typically needed at least a decade and hundreds of millions of euros to reach that point.
From Lab To Factory
The company grew out of VTT, the Technical Research Centre of Finland, where co-founders Tuure Parviainen and Matti Tähtinen developed the process before setting up Volare with Hyvönen in 2021. Parviainen ran the company until mid-2025 and is now chief science officer, while Tähtinen is chief technology officer.
The Pori factory itself was financed by a €26M round announced in May 2025 that combined equity, loans and public funding. Its backers included Maki.vc, Firstminute Capital, Springvest, the Finnish Climate Fund, the state lender Finnvera, the innovation agency Business Finland and Norion Bank.
Rules Open Up As Rivals Stumble
The EU has allowed insect protein in fish feed since 2017 and, in 2021, extended that to pig and poultry feed, two of the region’s biggest livestock markets.
That access has not been enough to keep every producer afloat. Ÿnsect, a French mealworm producer that raised more than $500M, was placed into judicial liquidation by a French court in late 2025 after it failed to fund a rescue plan.
Volare is betting that low costs will set it apart, saying the Pori plant cost many times less than rivals typically spend on a factory, helped by reusing an existing building and running a process that a small crew can operate.
Pori Ramp-Up Under Way
Volare now has a working factory in Pori, a binding deal with Skretting for its protein, buyers lined up for its oil and fresh equity to push ahead with a second, much larger plant. Behind it sits a simple model: taking food makers’ leftovers and turning them into ingredients for fish farms and pet food makers.
Much now depends on how quickly Pori reaches full output. The capacity, cost and profit targets are Volare’s own figures, and Volare 02 is still only a plan.
The company is also building in a sector where better-funded players have already failed, which makes its claim of lower factory costs central to its case. If Pori runs as designed, Volare intends to repeat the approach next to more of Europe’s food-industry suppliers.
