New pet food start-up founded

Corbiota GmbH, which emerged from a BASF accelerator, uses live worms to feed chickens. The aim is to improve their health.

Newly founded, with big plans: the Düsseldorf-based start-up Corbiota wants to feed chickens with live worms. On the one hand, this should significantly increase the agility of the animals and, on the other, improve their health. If the young company succeeds in what it promises, the animals would no longer need to be given so much medication. The constant addition of antibiotics for chickens and other farm animals with weak immune systems is considered one of the biggest challenges in agriculture.

The start-up claims to have already proven the effect of its worms as feed in initial studies. Now, just a few days after the founding celebrations, it wants to open a research facility in North Rhine-Westphalia. It is due to launch in September. "With the research facility, we want to understand the breeding of worms even better and thus make the breeding results more efficient, especially in the cold winter months," says Thorsten Kühn, Chief Operations Officer at Corbiota.

Corbiota was originally launched in 2019 as part of the Chemovator business incubator of the chemical group BASF. It has now been founded as an independent company in Düsseldorf.