Trying New Ingredients Requires Adequate Risk Management
Often discussed on the Insta-Pro blog is the need to pay attention to your animal diet formulations in order to save money when you can, while not only focusing on least cost. If you’re a field nutritionist, or even primarily engaged in formulating diets for commercial R&D trials, and things are going along smoothly, “change” is perhaps one of the last words you want to hear.
On the surface, this is understandable – unknowns can be scary, and you don’t want to get blamed for anything that goes wrong. However, not only will this mindset cause you to miss out on any potential improvements that could be made (by you, making you the hero for a while), but also, the food and feed industries are only showing signs of change and differentiation, the likes of which have not been seen for a long time – in fact, maybe as never before. Food trends like organic, non-GMO, slow growers, antibiotic free, environmentally friendly (see here and here), and locally produced are only some of the new types of products that consumers are demanding. New ingredients, and more broadly, new strategies will be required.
Assembling a diet formulation from a list of ingredients is not easy, especially when certain ones, some co-products in particular, vary much more than others (see here and here). Even widely-used ingredients exhibit variation in digestibility (i.e., that which is available for productive purposes), and well-known commodities are not really commodities.
What all of this really takes is some risk management, and we can help you do this. Insta-Pro International employs nutritionists with well over a decade of experience developing a wide range of animal diet formulations. We can help you ease into a new formulation to meet consumer demand – all the while lessening your exposure to risks. And, I really mean being able to quantify loss potential while working within your individual framework of comfort.
Contact me and let’s have a conversation about how high-quality, predictable dry extruded ingredients can help you in today’s animal nutrition marketplace.
