Jan Vanbrabant, Chief Customer Officer at DSM Animal Nutrition & Health speaks with Far Eastern Agriculture about measuring carbon footprint and making animal nutrition more sustainable
Could you tell me a bit about your company and the latest products you currently have on the market?
Jan Vanbrabant: What we have at DSM Animal Nutrition, is three pillars: essential products, such as vitamins and vitamin-mineral premixes – the core of DSM. Then we have performance solutions here at Biomin.
Sustell for example, is a tool that helps producers to calculate their footprint. This is a tool that can help a farmer, a big or small producer, to calculate the footprint they start from. We can then help them improve that footprint. Here, we have our Optimum Vitamin Nutrition (OVN), which we continue to improve for our customers. Coming to performance solutions, we have our new protease product, ProAct. Apart from this, we have also launched ZENzyme, an even better product to manage mycotoxin challenge. For DSM, this is the key to the future.
What are the current market trends and growth before and after COVID, both locally and globally?
Since VIV 2019, there have been a lot of changes and big challenges. During the pre-COVID days, there was a major protein gap in China and broiler production went up. Soon after china started recovering from this, COVID began, which is why, although the demand is going up, we now have to deal with a lot of overcapacity.
For example, pork production in the US and Brazil is expected to decrease in the short term, since they were the ones exporting. Also, since Europe is also exporting, the demand in those regions is slightly increasing. I am positive that in the coming weeks, if there is no new disaster, demand will go up. Moreover, while wheat prices in most parts of the world are actually good, the ingredient prices are high. I believe that as the market goes further up, prices will remain high and ingredient prices will soften further. This is the perfect environment for us because we can support them to produce more. Our goal is to make our protein production sustainable. Given the fact that we are now one of the leading companies in the industry, we feel that we can really make a difference.
What is the level of competition you receive?
Jan Vanbrabant: We are fulfilling the basic needs of the people and the portfolio we offer includes solutions and precision services. There is no other company that can offer this whole portfolio. I strongly believe that this really sets us apart from competition, because there is a lot of good competition out there.
Do you have any plans of expanding your business?
Jan Vanbrabant: Yes, we are always looking for expansion but more so, geographical expansion. We recently announced the acquisition of a company, 'Prodap' in Brazil. They offer formulation to customers and at the same time, provide the nutrition to them. This is currently only a business in Brazil, but we want to further expand this to the rest of the world to focus on other species as well. Apart from this, there was the Biomin acquisition which was a big one of course.
