8.1 Nutreco Exploration
8.1 Nutreco Exploration (NutEx) – our discovery branch
Over the past decade, Nutreco has invested in feed additives, because of their potential for future growth and their ability to help us achieve our purpose of Feeding the Future. Feed additives are a very effective way to tackle the challenge of feeding our growing population, especially in a world where the urgent issues of AMR and climate change make it necessary for us to reduce antibiotics use and increase our use of non-traditional feed ingredients. At Nutreco, we’ve pursued growth in this space by acquiring feed additive companies and investing in our own internal R&D. Yet, what we’re finding today is that this isn’t enough.
Developing feed additives is a transformative challenge that requires us to be both great at improving and exploiting our own business model while at the same time embarking on an exploration agenda: to look for solutions to the urgent needs of farmers, find completely new avenues for business development and empower the creation of specific technologies that could help resolve the urgent AMR issue.
Nutreco wants to be a market leader in the feed additive segment. Our aim is to launch creative, novel, effective and proprietary solutions on the market and become leaders in specific product category spaces. To bring this vision to life, we will leverage our innovation capabilities in R&D and strategic marketing across our business lines, including the Innovation Groups at Skretting and Trouw Nutrition. In addition, we have created a new entity that will serve as a creative engine feeding the Innovation Groups and the Global Feed Additives group with the novel solutions they need. This new entity is called Nutreco Exploration, or NutEx.
While our R&D department will maintain its focus on identifying customer needs and managing the lifecycles of our different product portfolios, NutEx will explore three distinct spaces to discover truly novel ideas and develop them into exclusive ingredients to match the needs of Nutreco’s businesses. These spaces are phytotechnology, biotechnology and physical chemistry. Making this work will require the businesses’ Innovation Groups and NutEx to work closely together.
By focusing on these three spaces and using a discovery-driven agenda, NutEx will create new organisational capabilities to provide new and exclusive ingredients – created to meet relevant market needs – for each business line. The Innovation Groups will continue to do what they do best: strategic positioning, downstream product development, optimised application, and solution creation (including smart mixing). However, they will now have a major competitive advantage because the solutions they create will include not only totally novel but also proprietary ingredients.