3 Biggest Challenges the Nutrition Industry Faces

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grumblebee

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Hi All

I was hoping I may be able to get some ideas from you in order to complete a project I am currently working on. I am putting together a presentation that focuses on the challenges that the equine nutrition industry is currently facing.

Any ideas would be extremely welcome!!

Many thanks

Bea
 
The fact that more and more people are seeing thro their semi science and spin about the "mixes" which are coated in sweatners and preservatives etc etc and returning to buying "straights" which of course are far cheaper and can be balanced accurately with specific minerals.

The explosion of the myth that a "Balancer" will work for all horses. The term "balancer" is soooo close to breaking the Trade Descriptions Act..
 
Zuzan said:
The fact that more and more people are seeing thro their semi science and spin about the "mixes" which are coated in sweatners and preservatives etc etc and returning to buying "straights" which of course are far cheaper and can be balanced accurately with specific minerals.

The explosion of the myth that a "Balancer" will work for all horses. The term "balancer" is soooo close to breaking the Trade Descriptions Act..
Click to expand...

/\ /\ What she said!!
 
1. Persuading (and taking a hit in their profits as a consequence) owners of overweight animals to stop overfeeding them.

2. Persuading owners of underweight animals to feed them enough (most of the "poor doers" I meet are simply not fed enough for their needs and I do wonder if it is because of the focus of the magazines, etc, on fatties, laminitis, etc, with the result that the novice owners think all horses can live on a scoop of hi-fi and don't understand how much food/how many meals a day a working blood horse will actually need, plus a number of them just tell me that feed is expensive so they won't give more, lots of people seem to think that a bag of feed a week for a working horse is excessive and it should last around a month).

3. Reformulating feeds to be lower in starch and sugar while still giving the same energy per kg as more horses show problems related to an excess of these and more owners become aware of this being an issue, while also making the feeds look appetising to the owners.
 
Get rid of added sugar. It's cheap, but we don't think it's good for children to eat chocolate in every feed and it's definitely not right for horses. Recognise that the 10% "safe" level authorised by the Laminitis Trust is not safe at all for many horses.

Stop selling people more food than their horses need. Most horses fed by what it says on the bag will be grossly overweight pretty quickly. The majority of happy hacker cobs probably don't need any hard food at all if fed enough hay/haylage.

Stop adding iron and manganese to feeds when most horses already graze land and eat hay which is too high in both.
 
grumblebee said:
Hi All

I was hoping I may be able to get some ideas from you in order to complete a project I am currently working on. I am putting together a presentation that focuses on the challenges that the equine nutrition industry is currently facing.

Any ideas would be extremely welcome!!

Many thanks

Bea
Click to expand...
The nutriition industry faces the same challenges as many others: they have to increase their profits year on year and how they do this is by selling more product[turnover]. and increase the proportion of the high end feeds [higher margins]
If you want to check this out you can ask the feed companies to send you their annual report, this will help you see the bigger picture.

Horse owners face the same challenges as the whole of the UK population and any other country in deep recession, ie not enough disposable income. Most of us can find ways of economising, but to be honest saving eg 25% on the cost of hard feed, [maybe 0.30p a day], is not going to be significant compared to cost of livery and shoeing, insurance etc, things we have little control over.
 
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No challenges whatsoever. 99% of horse owners will believe any well presented piece of pseudoscience.You could bag up any old weeds and someone will buy it if you put enough spin on the advertising. Alfalfa ,is it really so good for horses or have the crop driers meerly cashed in on an easy market to sell somthing that was becoming too expensive to produce for feed compounders .Why is there so much anti grain and starch ,is it really scientificly based or have the crop driers taken over the market and are overly pushing their products.
 
Agree with the comments here. Eps the produce of low sugar feeds but ones which provide effective leves of energy! Such contradicting information is confusing and you never really know if you're doing the right thing. One company tells you one thing and another company something totally different!
 
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