Rajmond Percze is a man on a mission: as a graduate economist, he spent his first professional years with Big Four firms on auditing and company evaluations. Yet something was missing. Then, in 2018, while attending a sustainability seminar at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, he had an “aha!” moment.
“They brought in vegetable waste in boxes, and while the lecture was on, forlike 30 minutes, these insects inside just consumed [the contents of] the boxes. I thought: What the heck has just happened?” Percze tells the Budapest Business Journal in an interview.
Insect larvae, he learned, could eat waste and be harvested to produce protein. Percze knew nothing about the subject but was determined to find out. Whether, for example, there was any operation in Hungary seeking to exploit the potential of insects in the food cycle, and if not, what was the business case?
It took him two years, with the help of two partners picked up along the way, to establish Agroloop, so-named because, as he argues, “30% of the food produced is wasted [… but] anything that is in the food supply chain should remain in the [food] loop, so that’s why we are [named] Agroloop.”
Based on their research, Percze and his co-founders chose to base their operation on the larvae of the black soldier fly, a species that struggles to survive at temperatures of less than 10°C (50°F) and is thus native to warmer, more humid climes than Hungary.
But it has one massive advantage over its protein-producing competitors: after its eggs hatch, given ideal conditions of food and temperature, its grubs mature within just 12 days, when they can be harvested to yield three valuable products: high-quality protein and oil, both of which can enrich livestock feed and pet food, and the grub excrement, called frass, which is rich in micro-biological components that can enhance the fertility of depleted soil.
With “a couple of ten million forints” in funding from the first angel investor, Agroloop established their pilot production plant in Törökkoppány, a tiny village in Somogy county, 180 km southwest of Budapest.
In a very modest, low-tech operation covering just 100 square meters, trial production began in 2021 with a mere 10 kg of protein powder and oil per week. This proved enough, however, “to provide evidence to investors that we are able to source the feedstock, grow and harvest the larvae, and to sell insect products to our customers,” says Percze. “This was the first milestone for us.”
In the ensuing years, with Törökkoppány production turning commercial in 2023, Agroloop began to provide insect protein and oil to several animal feed companies, including UBM, a listed Hungarian fodder group.
This success, in turn, helped persuade a clutch of venture capital companies, along with UniCredit Bank, to fund the company’s next big step, the 13,000 sqm feed protein production facility located in Üllő, on the southwest outskirts of Budapest.
Inaugurated last December, the plant’s 35-strong workforce is currently gearing up for full production, when it will house a staggering 1.8 billion larvae munching their way through 120 tonnes of by-products from domestic food producers daily.
The harvested larvae will then enable the plant to deliver 250 tonnes of high-quality protein meal, 50 tonnes of feed oil and 900 tonnes of organic fertilizer per month. Percze estimates this production should yield “more than EUR 10 million” annually.
At the inauguration in December, he declared: “We will be providing livestock and pets with a natural resource for the future. By opening this plant, we are not only aiming to meet the growing global demand but also to establish industrial-scale insect farming in Central and Eastern Europe and to become a world leader in the long term.” Speaking to the BBJ three months later, he is a little more philosophical.
“The reason I’m doing this is because I know and believe it is the right thing to do. I could have established an IT, media market company or whatever, but I have two kids and my wife, and when they recall me [in the future], then the statement should be that ‘he tried everything he believed in to make the earth a better place.’ That’s my main motivation,” he says. As for the process and what it involves, he is purely pragmatic.
“I’m not in love with insects; they are an asset for me,” he underlines. “The rationale behind what we are doing is we are collecting low-value biomass from the nearby factories, and from that producing high-quality protein.”
With an education in economics and work experience in audit and company evaluation, Rajmond Percze is the first to admit he has no deep, research-driven knowledge of general biology, let alone the peculiarities of the black soldier fly and its complex life cycle.
“The majority of what we apply here [in Hungary] is based on general knowledge that can be found on the internet. We don’t have any patents, and we are not a technology development company,” he emphasizes.
Fully aware that there are companies focusing, for example, on the breeding and production of eggs, while others are expanding on the protein side, formulating new products on the lucrative pet food market, Percze has oriented Agroloop to focus on understanding and exploiting the 12-day lifespan of the fly’s larvae.
As a result, the company imports black soldier fly larvae that are less than one day old and barely visible to the human eye from FreezeM, a leading innovator in black soldier fly breeding technologies, from its center in Germany. Agroloop then focuses on raising these to maturity in the most efficient manner.
“It can be tricky because this is a new industry, evolving day by day. And maybe I feel the intention to go a step forward and do more research and development, but my belief is that first, we want to be the best for these 12 days when we are rearing the larvae,” he reasons.
Naturally, from their work so far, the company has acquired what Percze terms “Kind of business secrets, tips and tricks on how to do this. We have the experience.”
He doesn’t rule out future expansion on either side of the current value chain. It’s more a case of not running before he can walk.
“We will see in the future whether we are going to expand beyond this 12-day time frame, but first, we want to do our homework for these days,” Percze affirms.
This article was first published in the Budapest Business Journal print issue of March 21, 2025.
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