Managing moisture for better margins

Trial equals error

It is a common question among petfood manufacturers: how do I produce nourishing petfood that ensures a healthy life for pets, while keeping my production process as efficient and cost-effective as possible?

The answer lies in analysing every step of the production process and checking whether improvements can be made to increase profit without reducing quality. Many manufacturers, however, fail to improve in one crucial step: the drying process.  

When it comes to cutting costs, petfood producers look at their direct expenses such as maintenance and energy. More technical procedures, like drying, are often overlooked. The trial and error method rules this step, causing manufacturers to lose time and waste resources.

Being able to foresee these effects could help manufacturers not only in dosing individual ingredients more accurately but also enable them to work with fresh ingredients like fresh meat. While petfood is being more humanised, adding these fresh products will lead to a competitive advantage on the petfood market.   

How formulation software helps

The great news is that there are ways to calculate accurately the effects caused by drying. Besides focusing on new production methods or machinery innovation, manufacturers should also be able to rely on their formulation software.

Formulation software, such as Adifo’s BESTMIX software, should offer a multi-level product design. This means that the product developer can design the final product as well as several, separately produced, sub-products, all at once.
Managing your complete recipe design from the earliest stages onwards allows you to optimise the composition of every sub-product in such a way that the nutritional requirements of the final product are fulfilled at the lowest cost. Look for software that allows you to process sub-recipes on their own, while also taking specific parameters into account such as evaporation on the level of sub-recipes or individual ingredients. This method guarantees manufacturers that their raw materials are accurately dosed and form a finished product that is compliant and manufactured in the most cost-effective way.

Full control

While the drying process used to be a stumbling block, modern petfood formulation software should provide a solution. By calculating the effects that are caused by drying on each of the individual sub-recipes, manufacturers can eradicate several uncertainties from the start and optimise an entire recipe. Erasing the unpredictability from your production process allows you not only to be in full control of your expenses but also to accurately produce the nutritional quality that is mentioned on the label.

Adifo’s BESTMIX formulation software is an all-encompassing solution, giving you full control and an overview of the entire petfood production process. The software assists in testing raw materials, breaking down the master recipe into sub-recipes for full recipe management and even creating compliant labels. BESTMIX offers a complete tool that helps you in creating competitive and compliant petfood.