Trouw Nutrition, part of the Netherlands-based Nutreco started its journey in India in the year 2013, has established a manufacturing facility, its first in India, at Jadcherla near Hyderabad. The factory was virtually inaugurated by the ambassador of Netherlands, Marten Van Den Berg on 11 December 2020.
In an e-interview with Think Grain Think Feed, Dr. Saurabh Shekhar, Managing Director, Trouw Nutrition South Asia shared more details about the expansion and market opportunities that the company sees in Indian market. Read the excepts below:
Would you please share about the greenfield project of Trouw Nutrition? How it would bring value to Indian customers?
South Asia and India are key to our mission of Feeding the Future and the state-of-the-art production facility in Jadcherla, Hyderabad reinforces our commitment to the South Asian market. The production facility marks the first greenfield project of Nutreco, 20,000 MT plant that is equipped with high-end technology to deliver superior quality vitamin, mineral premixes, mineral blends and feed safety solutions for all species.
In India, we had operations since 2013 through our sales representative office, however in order to bring added value to our customers, post 2017 we have heavily focused on building a team of subject-matter specialists who can drive our core values – Caring, Capable, Collaborative and Innovative. While at the same time, with the production facility we also aim to bring efficiencies through better lead times and providing customizations to our customers. The new facility will cater to the market needs of the entire South Asia and is expected to clock full capacity utilisation by 2025.
The company is coming up with unique premixing technology with its 90 years of experience. Can you share more details about it?
- Trouw Nutrition completes 90 years in 2021, and the state-of-the-art production facility, located at Jadcherla, Hyderabad has following key features:
- A unique high-end technology to ensure that we have the best quality of premix for our customers.
- We ensure end-to-end Quality and Traceability through our company-wide program, Nutrace. Through Nutrace we focus on all aspects of quality with added emphasis on feed-to-food safety.
- The facility ensures that the final product remains untouched by hand through complete automation from raw material handling to automatic bagging.
- With a tower height of 45 m. we have vertical flow technology to ensure high quality homogenous premix.
- The entire factory has food grade equipment for highest quality and safety.
This unique premix facility in Telangana is centrally located which is one of the most investor-friendly states and also a major belt for poultry and aqua with logistical access to good ports. We are certain that with this new plant we will serve our customers’ demand for quality products.
Global Protein Outlook 2021 by Rabobank predicts Indian Poultry production in 2021 to return near to 2020-levels. Your thoughts?
We are optimistic on the Indian Poultry Production trends. While we have seen an impact of COVID-19 throughout the industry even before COVID-19 had hit India because of false rumours regarding consumption of meat and egg. The industry was impacted with lower placement, less feed production and crash in market prices. However, this has also been an opportunity for all of us since the industry started aggressively promoting benefits of consuming meat, milk and egg to improve immunity. The industry is bouncing back with a positive trend on end product prices.
The current consumer trends also demand for safe food with responsible usage of antibiotics, processed chicken and utilization of digital technology/IoT platforms to improve efficiency and productivity.
We are a consuming economy with all the production currently being consumed locally. To sustain the huge demand from a growing population, with India expected to have the largest population in the world by 2025, we definitely need to look at cost-effective measures for improving production. There are opportunities for exports and value-added products. Farmers need to look at an integrated approach of Farm, Feed and Health to produce high quality products and capture the available opportunities.
How do you see the impact of FSSAI regulations on the Indian feed industry?
As mentioned, even with COVID-19 we had seen a change in consumer trends and there is a demand for safe food. FSSAI regulations shall also emphasize the same. As a progressive industry and to fulfil the needs of a growing population for animal protein, the entire production value chain is geared up for that. The industry has always been a producer of safe meat, milk and egg and the regulations will only make it stronger.
Consumption of Antimicrobials usage is predicted to increase by 67% by 2030 compared to 2010 levels and Asia would be a key region. How do you see the AMR adoption in the Asian market?
We strongly believe in the responsible usage of antibiotics, while it is certainly difficult to completely replace antibiotics, but responsible usage is critical. AMR adoption in Asia will be driven by increasing awareness and demand from consumers for safe meat and increasingly stringent regulations.
Globally we had done this successfully by partnering with our customers and supporting them in their drive for responsible usage of antibiotics. We recommend a more holistic approach to addressing this issue by focusing on optimisation of the total production chain. Our Gut Health Programme is a proven model of success globally since gut forms a critical component of overall animal health, immunity and performance.
What strategies is Trouw implementing to ensure quality and traceability?
As global leaders we have a huge focus on quality of all our products through a very stringent vendor assurance and material risk assessment programs. To ensure feed-to-food safety, quality and traceability we follow a company-wide program, Nutrace®. We ensure uncompromising standards from raw materials to finished products nullifying our customers’ risk. We follow a completely transparent operation with stringent five-step quality checks for customer confidence and satisfaction.
Through Nuterra, a Nutreco-wide sustainability programme, we hold ourselves accountable towards our environment. Our sustainability goals are also aligned with UN Sustainable Development Goals. As a commitment to our sustainability goals, we have also taken measures in our recently inaugurated premix facility to ensure that we leave minimum carbon footprints. We have invested in sustainability efforts like rainwater harvesting and sewage effluent treatment plants to ensure that we recharge rainwater back to earth and reuse our liquid waste.
How NOA (Nutriopt On Site Advisor) could help the feed producer? Would you also share about its acceptance in India?
Our business goals, in alignment with our mission “Feeding the Future”, are to ensure sustainable development to feed our future generations. One of the key aspects for this is to ensure optimization of natural resources through precision nutrition. We use digital tools and big data to sustainably improve feeding and farming practices while meeting production objectives. With precision nutrition as a key focus area of innovation, we have NutriOpt – an innovative, digital platform that encompasses raw material data, least cost formulation, feeding programmes, nutritional insights and system optimization to support sustainable precision farming. NutriOpt On-site Adviser (NOA) is an innovation that brings a lab to sample by helping in real-time analysis of raw materials and is powered by our comprehensive NutriOpt database to help the farmers in quicker decision-making. We have promoted the unique service to our customers since 2018 who have been extremely receptive and have enthusiastically adopted the technology for its ease of use and convenience.
