While Japanese indoor farming companies use robots to grow lettuce in fully automated greenhouses, a startup in the U.S. hopes to do the same thing for grubs. Grubbly Farms , based in Atlanta, is building an automated system to feed black soldier fly larvae food waste and then use the larvae as animal feed in agriculture.

The founders, two recent college grads, started experimenting with bugs in their apartment after learning that insects could help solve some of farming’s sustainability problems. Chickens that eat soy grown on deforested land could eat bugs instead; farmed fish could eat meal made from grubs rather than overfished ocean fish.

“We ordered our first 700 larvae off Amazon,” says Grubbly Farms co-founder Patrick Pittaluga. “We hatched the larvae into flies and started breeding flies in our laundry room of our apartment while Sean [his co-founder] was still at Georgia Tech.”

With more research, they found that there was a market for their new animal feed and that customers were open to eating chicken raised with grubs–which are, after all, something chickens would naturally eat on a traditional farm.

“We found that not only was it something that people would not mind, but they really liked the idea of a sustainable feed and reclaiming lost nutrients and waste, preventing it from going to landfill, and converting it into a another usable source of protein,” he says.

Working with the Georgia Center of Innovation for Energy Technology, an accelerator, the startup connected with a local juice company to use its wasted fruit and vegetable pulp. As the grub farm grows, it plans to also work with a local industrial bakery, which throws out around 20 tons of food waste a week. (For regulatory reasons, all of the food waste they use has to come from industry, not from consumers’ plates, where there’s a chance of contamination.)

Right now, the initial product, “pet chicken treats,” is more expensive than regular chicken feed. But they hope that will change as the company finishes its automated process. Right now, everything is manual. In 20 days, the larvae grow to about 7,000 times their initial body weight; every day, a batch of larvae born on a certain day need to be fed incrementally more food.