About us
PHILIPPE CROCHARD
Philippe is a self-made man and has been an entrepreneur for more than 30 years, having established businesses in France and Asia, in the fields of communication, marketing, web and technology. He has studied Black Soldier Fly and how to raise them in an industrial way for many years. Together with SFly partners in Asia, he has validated BSF was a good fit with industrial needs for a chitin source, and that the rearing was scalable. From 2015 on, when back in France, he has actively worked on securing ways to establish the SFactory in order to produce a high quality chitin/chitosan, with ways of producing and analysis the growth of Black Soldier Fly that are adapted to most demanding markets and regulations.
JÉRÔME DELAY
Jérôme Delay holds a Master of Science in Chemical Engineering from Université de Technologie de Compiègne (UTC) in France. He has been working more than 10 years with customers who needed specific chemical formulations or adaptations depending upon some new operating conditions, new products, new technologies (water treatment, food processing, semiconductor Industry). He has lived in the USA where he was President & CEO of a small business company acting in Solvent Recovery. Since he is back from the USA he has been instrumental in the restructuring and refocusing of small business companies in France, putting them back into a profitable and well oriented business activity. His know-how and experience include management, finance, industrial, technical, sales and strategic skills.
Philippe has invested 4 years of his time in Asia and France with some local associates working out technical and zoological data and tests to maximize raising and development of Black Soldier Fly larvaes. All types of feed have been investigated (municipal & food waste, palm oil residues, cereals, all types of manure…), as well as a very big number of operational conditions checked. This ended up with a unique know-how on how to adapt the weight to weight ratio depending on final goal. These tests would have been impossible to organize in Europe because of legislation constraints (feed ban) and very high costs incurred.
Jérôme has developed a specific chemical extraction process adapted to the chitin (form, repartition, concentration) embedded into the BSF larvae, and the feed process developed to maximize the chitin content into it. This process is simpler than existing ones (though requiring more control), compatible with the required high purity grades of chitosan, and with a lower overall environmental footprint.
They became associates when Philippe was back from Asia and have together developed an integrated process for breed & feed of BSF larvae with very high throughput, with a specific extraction and refining process for chitin/chitosan. Though the machines and know-how developed for raising the larvae are compatible with mostly any use expected from BSF larvae (transformation of organic wastes, manure abatement and recovery, production of feed material for aquaculture), it quickly appeared to us the only economically viable process established in Europe on the long term is the production of high purity chitosan, from an alternative source than crustaceas, that would be entirely traceable, auditable, with a quality that can be reproduced batch after batch, and Food & Pharma certified. This is the aim of Project SFly.
SFly a brand of :
Factory – R&D chitosan
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