Abstract
Food waste poses a significant challenge to the sustainability of traditional food production systems, prompting global efforts to combat waste throughout the supply chain. Sustainable food production emerges as a critical concept in response to increasing concerns about environmental degradation and the need for alternative protein sources driven by global population growth. In this context, insect production offers a promising solution by converting low-value organic waste into nutrient-rich products, thus reducing waste and environmental impact. This paper addresses the urgent need for sustainable and efficient food production systems by introducing a facility location problem within the network design of insect production. The objective is to develop methods to scale insect-derived product production by identifying optimal locations with the best conditions for establishing insect production facilities. Emphasis is placed on connecting suppliers with production, highlighting the critical role suppliers and their by-products play in promoting a sustainable industry. Instances were generated to assess model performance, including supplier and facility locations, by-product availability and selection. Varying by-product availability yielded different optimization outcomes. The experiments results offered insights into the model’s behavior under different conditions. The results shown that varying the composition of substrate had a major implication on the augment of costs compared to varying the by-product availability.