The beginning — it wasn't my idea
It all started with my father, Dr. Paul André Olivier, and a Texas A&M entomologist named Dr. Clifford E. Hoelscher. In the late 1990s, my father was looking for ways to improve municipal solid waste recycling. Dr. Hoelscher pointed him toward the pioneering research of Dr. Craig Sheppard at the University of Georgia.
Dr. Sheppard was the godfather of the Black Soldier Fly. At a time when most entomologists were asking how to eradicate this species, he was asking how to work with it. His design was deeply agricultural — concrete basins with a 35-degree ramp where mature prepupae crawled themselves into collection gutters. No trap. No energy. Just biology.
I was a college student when I first walked into the greenhouse in Waxahachie, Texas. We were a metal recycling family, so the idea of using biology to pre-process waste before sorting it made complete sense to us.
GrubTubs — everything we won, and what we lost
In 2017 I founded GrubTubs in Austin. Austin had a zero-waste policy — perfect for us. Within the first year we were collecting from 100+ restaurants. We won the WeWork Creator Awards — $360,000, the biggest prize in Austin that year. We spent $80,000 of that on dishwashing equipment alone, because you can't create safe feed without sterilizing the containers.
But we hit a regulatory wall in Texas that prohibited livestock feed derived from food waste. After raising over $1M, the path in Texas closed. But I learned something that changed everything: pig manure is the superior substrate. Not direct food waste. The pig standardizes it, inoculates it — and Wageningen studies confirmed it.
Ecuador and the BioHive — December 2024
In December 2024 I was at the Yachana Foundation in Ecuador's Amazon jungle. Thinking about how to make BSF work for someone with no access to molded plastic or reliable supply chains. The answer came at night: bricks.
You don't manufacture anything. You stack bricks in a circle. Flies enter, lay eggs, larvae mature and exit on their own — right to the waiting chickens outside. I filmed a small video and posted it. Tens of thousands of views. Farmers in Africa, Asia, Latin America responded.
Full circle: Dr. Craig Sheppard was right from the start. BSF needs to be integrated with existing livestock operations, permanently. The BioHive is not the future of BSF — it's a return to its roots.