North Chungcheong — Papillon's Kitchen opened in 2015 as Seoul's first "insect restaurant," serving dishes made from ground bugs.
Ex-culinary professor Kim Young-Wook started the business with some of his students to develop insect-based snacks and to run the restaurant. The team spent hours a day in a lab, grinding dried mealworms into powder form.
Papillon's Kitchen closed temporarily in 2018 and Kim is not currently a restauranteur. But his company KEIL, where he serves as CEO, is now Korea's largest supplier of edible insects to food, cosmetics, and animal feed factories. Mealworms are the focus. "Around 100 tons of mealworms are produced in Korea per year," says Kim. "Once our factory starts full operation, KEIL's annual capacity alone will reach 1,000 tons."
The farming process starts in a blue tray filled with wheat bran, which is the grain's outer layer. More than 2,000 mealworms grow from eggs, larva, pupa to adults per box. One room contains an "egg tower" where the trays are kept until the eggs hatch. It has multiple vertical pillars, where the trays slowly move up, down, and around to the next pillar. "It takes 150 days for mealworms to fully grow. With special chemicals, this process can be reduced to 60 days," said Kim.
In the past, KEIL had to source mealworms from domestic farms, which are mostly small in size. That limited production volume. Under the cooperation model, KEIL will handle the trickiest part--of cultivating eggs to larva state-- and leave the rest to farms to boost scale.
"A single mealworm can produce so many ingredients," says Kim. "Its oil is an unsaturated fatty acid that can be used in skincare products. After extracting protein from its tissue, the shell offers protein and minerals that can be used in animal feed. Even insect waste can be used as fertilizers.
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