At Nutreco, Karin oversees an extremely diverse and unique team of people: experts from the animal nutrition industry, phytochemists, chemists, biologists, herbalists and plant growers – a very interdisciplinary group. And that's important! Connectivity between specialists in all disciplines is required to discover PhytoComplexes relevant to our animal industry. Everyone on the team speaks the same language and shares the same thinking and the same goal – which really facilitates collaboration. Functioning in a discovery environment with this kind of expertise is leading to exciting innovation. “We are thinking out of the box here,” said Karin. “People are not just focused on their own areas of expertise but open to everything and with a holistic view: looking all around them to what their colleagues are doing. I think that’s one reason we’re successful.”
Bringing the team together under one roof has created a situation unlike anything else in the industry. As a result, the work being done at Nutreco’s Garden of the Future is creating products of a quality and consistency that is unmatched, and very difficult to replicate. The facility handles every aspect of discovery, plant domestication, cultivation and product development in one place, in close connection with Nutreco’s business lines, Trouw Nutrition and Skretting. “In my earlier career, we developed the plant material for customers and then they took over – we’ve never had this kind of visibility and interaction all the way through to the end product before,” said Karin.
How do we do it? The Nutreco Exploration team first consults with the business to decide which animal challenges to address. Then the team defines suitable molecular targets involved in the process they want to impact. They select biological models to test the efficacy of plant candidates on these targets.” said Karin.
After that, the team selects the plant candidates using various techniques. Chemotaxonomy, for example, can help them find a species with a specific phytochemical composition or that enables us to achieve multiple targeting effects.
“We consider criterium such as IP landscaping, to determine whether the potential product candidates can be protected by a patent, or cultivation feasibility to narrow down our list,” Karin explained. The final short list of plants is then tested for effectiveness in the target animal species.
