Particularly in tumultuous times, the priority for our procurement team is availability, ensuring we have the right nutrients available at the right location to ensure uninterrupted supply to our customers. As commodity prices remain high, we are focusing on alternative ingredients and suppliers to spread the risk and address sustainability challenges. This has created opportunities for several novel ingredients to become more competitive.
In 2022 we made important progress in novel ingredients, increasing our overall inclusion rate from 0.056% to 0.8% of total raw materials purchased.
The volume increase was partially due to our increased usage of omega 3 alternatives, such as algae and omega 3 canola oil. Several of these oils are now commercially available and implemented in most of our aquafeed businesses. We saw good momentum behind the introduction of novel vegetable raw materials, such as horse bean starch and concentrated maize distillers' grains, and we are pleased that these products, developed specifically for the feed industry, are finding their way into animals’ diets.
Nutreco was only able to achieve this progress by constantly focusing on novel market opportunities. We fully utilise our global procurement, quality assurance and R&D resources to identify, develop and implement ingredients that fit into our novel strategy, which is to focus first and foremost onlow-footprint and right-cost ingredients.
Nutreco has long believed that the only way to make real progress in sustainability is to work together with other stakeholders in the supply chain.
A recent collaboration between Noblesse Proteins BV, Looop and Selko is one example of how we connect businesses and maintain food by-products within the feed chain.
Building connections between the food and beverage industries and agriculture provides opportunities to address the gap between today’s feed production levels and the future’s projected food requirements. Using by-products from the food industry in animal feed enables us to close the circle and keep more nutrients within the food chain.
These by-products, despite not meeting human taste, texture, or other physicochemical requirements, are often highly suitable for animal nutrition. Some examples include liquid or dry by- products from oilseeds, cereals, roots, potatoes and fruits in the food and beverage industry, as well as processed animal proteins (PAPs) from meat by-products. The extensive use of inedible human by-products in animal feed and their upcycling into human-edible food is a crucial requirement for sustainable animal protein production.
At present, a significant amount of nutritional and digestible by-products continues to be used for energy production. Considering today’s volatile energy markets, and the ambitions of the European Union around recognising renewable energy as one way to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, allocating by-products toward energy production might seem to be a good idea. However, according to the food waste hierarchy (figure 1), by-products’ use as food has the highest priority, followed by use in animal nutrition. Only when neither are possible are other uses acceptable, such as the production of biofuels.
Safety is always a top priority across the food product chain and maintaining by-products within the food-to-feed chain often comes with microbial challenges. For this reason, to effectively use by-streams of food and beverage production as ingredients for high-value production processes, like animal nutrition, managing microbial quality is of the utmost importance. This is where Nutreco, and particularly our Selko Feed Additives team, can play an important role.
We are continuously exploring opportunities to collaborate with industry players to increase the use of circular ingredients. Our Selko Feed Additives team is running initiatives in different parts of the world to preserve valuable nutrient sources and utilise them within animal feed; its aim is to produce more sustainable animal protein to feed the growing world population.
