Innovafeed is growing production by 500% with Tulip
A First-of-Its-Kind Facility
Innovafeed is a leading biotechnology company on a mission to revolutionize animal and plant nutrition.
In Nesle, France, Innovafeed operates the world's largest insect farm, raising black soldier flies and turning them into protein meal, oil and fertilizer. The company is rapidly scaling its operations, and with growth comes complexity.
At Innovafeed, what we do is new. There is no other factory like the one we have here.
As a pioneering and fast-moving company, Innovafeed needed a production system that could keep up. Their operations and processes change quickly, and they needed a solution that could adapt just as fast. Each work center used different tools—Google Sheets, Zoho Forms, and other siloed systems. Processes were difficult to track and even more difficult to scale. Operators simply spent too much time jumping between tools that were not designed to meet their unique needs.
The team was looking for:
- A flexible, composable production system to support fast iteration across their unique processes
- A way to bring consistency across work centers and unify production systems
- End-to-end traceability and automation across their expansive facilities
- A scalable platform that empowered process experts and didn’t require extensive IT expertise
Innovafeed chose Tulip for its flexibility, ease of use, and ability to support both frontline operations and orchestration of their complex automation systems. The team needed to move fast, build their own apps, and continuously adapt and iterate on their expanding operations—all made possible by Tulip.
Establishing Consistency and Control Across the Facility
From detailed container tracking to quality management and shop floor orchestration, Innovafeed runs it all on Tulip. The platform integrates machinery and equipment, handheld devices and Innovafeed's industrial automation systems—creating a unified home for their entire operation.
At the heart of it all are Automations. Innovafeed’s engineers create no-code logic flows in Tulip Automations that power their extensive network of automation systems, and allow the team to orchestrate the movement of millions of flies around the production facility without human intervention.
As the flies mature from one lifecycle stage to the next, more than 160 different automations enable Innovafeed to operate at unrivaled scale. Frontline operators are able to focus their work on value added tasks, while mundane material moving and tracking tasks are handled by Tulip. All told, these automations carry out over 2 million transactions per month.
Traceability, that's absolutely necessary and key for us. So at each phase of the transformation we… register genealogy into a history of movements.
Innovafeed’s solution allows them to track and control every container movement, every machine action, and every production step in one place. Each container is scanned by RFID tags and logged as it moves through the facility, providing end-to-end traceability and genealogy for the production team. Tulip apps are also integrated at key points in the production for in-process quality inspection, allowing operators to ensure that the product meets their high quality requirements. Production data in Tulip is hosted on the AWS cloud, helping the team maintain a detailed genealogy for each product that Innovafeed creates.
Tulip Provides a Digital Foundation for Global Expansion
Tulip doesn't just support Innovafeed's growth—it enables it. The ability to design, execute, and iterate automation logic and operations apps in-house has been a game changer for a facility where flexibility, precision, and scalability are essential.
The impact of the system has been felt across the business.
- For frontline operators: Less time switching between tools, more time focused on value-added tasks. Apps are ergonomic, intuitive, and easy to adjust to changing needs.
- For management: Data flows from the shop floor in real time. Supervisors can see what's happening, identify problems, and make decisions faster.
- For the business: Tulip enables Innovafeed to scale efficiently while maintaining traceability, compliance, and quality.
Tulip is what allows us to scale up when we go from 5,000 pallets a day to 30,000 pallets a day.
Innovafeed works hard to contribute to the emergence of sustainable food systems by developing a pioneering and innovative industry. Having proven that its insect production methods can work at scale, the company is now expanding, with the goal of building 10 factories around the world by 2030. Tulip will play a key role in supporting their automation systems and the frontline worker experience, providing operators and engineers with intuitive interfaces for production visibility, quality control, and operations management.
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