The European Food Safety Authority participates at the Conference with an info desk to provide information, answer questions, and engage with participants interested in the feed additives application procedure.
The info stand will be located in the exhibition area, at the entrance to the plenary room and will be open throughout the conference.
Animal feed has a social responsibility to contribute to more sustainable food production systems. With diminishing availability of farming land, climatic changes and the threat of declining water resources, the task is to meet the growing demand for food, feed, fibre, fuel, and industrial products using less resources. This latter aspect will reduce use and redisposition of resources – in other words: ‘Do more with less!’. These aspects, together with the increase in the cost of traditional feed for production animals over the last years, persuaded feed researchers and producers to look into alternative sustainable protein and energy sources for feeding animals. For example, insects, algae, ex-food(also termed former food products), hemp-based products, wood by-products, winery by-products as well as duckweed are seen as interesting alternative protein/energy sources for feed and are expected to be increasingly used around the globe as replacers for conventional nutrients sources. In this scenario new and alternative feed ingredients demand the development of suitable techniques to recycle more of the food wastes and transform these into valuable ingredients for animal feed. From a feed industry perspective, novel techniques must be scalable to economically feasible processes. For future process optimisation, collaboration between skilled data scientists, machine experts, technologists and nutritionists is necessary.
Key words: innovative feed and additives, insects, ex-food, algae, agro-industrial co-products, sustainability, circular economy, feed processing, novel and emerging processing techniques
The importance of quality, safety and authentication in the the feed chain cannot be underestimated. Feed quality and safety start with the characterization and selection of high-quality raw materials and require the use of appropriate processing methods at the farm and industry levels. Feed quality is crucial as it has a direct impact on the health and productivity of the animals. Feed safety plays a major role in the global safety of the food chain by reducing the risk of contaminants and impurities entering the food chain. Moreover, compound feed is a complex mixture of feed materials and feed additives, where the farmer relies on the information about its composition given on the packing label of these products. The details of these descriptions and other supporting documents on the origin of the ingredients should assure that the feedingstuffs meets the expectations in terms of benefits, quality and safety. Therefore, there is a strong need for concepts that allow for full traceability of the ingredients. Important components of these concepts include for example fit for purpose analytical methods or the use of specific markers. Finally, with the globalisation of the production, authentication issues (including assessment of origin and fraud detection) may be a future challenge for the feed sector, and this warrants well developed control practices.
Key words: quality, safety, traceability, fraud, control of product label, Innovative analytical methods, marker concepts, authentication