ANN ARBOR, Mich.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–$KBLB #KBLB–Kraig Biocraft Laboratories, Inc. (OTCQB: KBLB) (“Company”), the leading developer of spider silk based fibers, announced today that operations at its Vietnamese production facility, which just formally kicked off earlier this month, are on track to set new production capacity records for the Company.
As expected, the first batch of production silkworms, announced earlier this month, are thriving on their diet of fresh mulberry leaves and the warm, humid climate at the facility in Vietnam.
The Company expects that this first round of production will be complete within two to three weeks. The entire population of emerging silk moths, from this first production cycle, will be dedicated to breedstock population expansion, resulting in a more than a 100x increase in silkworm egg production and preparing for what the Company believes will be its largest production batch, scheduled for November.
The November production batch, in Vietnam, is expected to expand the Company’s capacity to produce its specialized recombinant spider silk to a level that collectively exceeds the entirety of its U.S. based production, over the last ten years.
This critical milestone, in the Company’s commercialization of eco-friendly and cost effective recombinant spider silk, has been the key focus of Company management’s initiative to create high performance and environmentally sustainable alternatives to synthetic textiles. The completion of this first wave of production is validating the Company’s business model and its transgenic spider silk silkworms. The Company expects that its factory will have capacity to produce more than 8 metric tons of its specialized silk in 2020, with a total capacity of roughly 40 metric tons per year, once fully utilized.
“There has been considerable interest in Kraig Labs’ high performance fibers, from multiple internationally recognized brands, so bringing our specialized silkworms online should allow us to deliver our first large batch of fabric and begin to fulfill the fiber request backlog,” said COO Jon Rice. “Having now successfully delivered the silkworms to the factory, watched our team hard at work rearing this first batch, and preparing the factory for the expanding workload, and walked the rows of silk production rack, tray, and mounting boxes, I believe that we are on track to meet our production targets for 2020.”