New start-up for pet food founded

Corbiota GmbH, which emerged from a BASF accelerator, relies on live worms to feed chickens. This should improve their health.

Newly founded, with big plans: 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 so heavily medicated. The constant addition of antibiotics for chickens and also other farm animals whose immune systems are weak is considered one of the biggest challenges in agriculture.

In initial studies, the start-up claims to have already proven the effect of its worms as feed. Now, a few days after the founding celebrations, it wants to open a research facility in North Rhine-Westphalia. It is to be launched as early as September. "With the research facility, we want to understand the breeding of the worms even better and thus make the breeding results more efficient, especially in the cold winter months," says Thorsten Kühn, Corbiota's chief operations officer.

Corbiota originally launched in 2019 as a company of the Chemovator business incubator from chemical company BASF. Now it has been established as an independent company in Düsseldorf.