My name is John D. – I am a feed-designer

When we are looking at the development of the food-industry, the challenge is to develop new products that please the consumer (and the profit margin of the retailer). You can ask yourself what should be the effect of this for the complete chain?

Food design
When we take a closer look at food design, we see that these men and women are young artists, who are doing strange things with food, with no respect for history or tradition. They only concentrate on taste and the way the product is satisfying the consumer. This way of thinking is not only a change for agrculture but also pose a challenge.

Examples are sometimes crazy; for instance fried red cabbage, smoothies made from a mixture of all types of fruit and vegetables, energy drinks from pressed wheatgrass, etc. Not only new products are developed but also new ingredients and new technology – food-design starting at the basics.

Standard feed
But let us take this idea into the feedmill. Here we produce optimum feed for the animals; optimized on costs, energy content, health of the animal etc. In general a few types of feed are produced for a big group of customers. But we also see that more and more large farmers have their own demands and specify their own feed. Relevant in this is the discussion that Emmy started in her blog on garlic. What can this new ingredient mean for the feed-industry?

 

If we take a closer look at this development we see that this should have consequences for the feedmills-of-the-future. The Magi-con feedmill at Saweco, Oirlo, The Netherlands, is basically already constructed as a kitchen. The engineers did not design a mill for the production of one type of feed, but developed one where you can "cook" feed to the demanded specifications of the market.