How turning cake and crisps into nutritious animal feed reduces food waste and feeds Britain’s pigs and poultry
Juliette Tompkins • October 5, 2021
ABN is Love British Food's main farming Official Partner. It feeds more than 228 million pigs and chickens each year, providing feed for every stage of pig and poultry production, from piglets to growing and breeding pigs, and from laying hens to broiler hens, turkeys, ducks and game.
You may have seen ABN lorries out and about on the road, delivering feed to British pig and poultry farms across the country.
This is the story of SugaRich, a feed range that is made from left-overs from the manufacture of cake, biscuits, crisps, breakfast cereals and bread, supplied by ABN to Britain’s farmers. The ‘former foodstuff’* is provided by the UK’s largest food manufacturers and supermarkets, including a few brands you may have heard of… Mr Kipling, Maryland Cookies, Kingsmill, Mars, Cadbury, Jammie Dodgers and Ryvita.
‘Former foodstuff’, as it is called, is food that is rejected from the manufacturing sites or supermarkets, and therefore deemed unsuitable for human consumption. Instead of it being wasted, over 400,000 tonnes of surplus food is instead turned into a high energy raw material ingredient for livestock feed each year.
So how does it work?
There are specific formulations and products for pigs, poultry and both dairy and beef cattle, based on the ‘former foodstuff’ products used in the process, each with differing nutritional qualities and benefits. For pigs and poultry, confectionery and bakery products high in oil, starch and energy levels, such as crisps, bread, chocolate bars, snack bars and biscuits are best suited.
The ‘former foodstuff’ is processed using a unique method to ensure that the valuable nutrients are retained within the feed. It is then ground and sieved to make a free-flowing meal, and the final product, which is between 10-15% oil, is distributed to ABN mills where it is included in their poultry and pig feeds and then delivered to ABN customers.
SugaRich biscuit meal brings nutritional benefits to both pigs and poultry, both of which require a high-energy diet. Pigs and poultry are good at digesting starch, sugar and oil, but less-so at digesting dietary fibre, so the high nutrient and energy density of biscuits, cakes, crisps and chocolate are the perfect base ingredient. SugaRich also has a nice sweet-smelling biscuity aroma to it, encouraging pigs and poultry to eat lots of it.
As part of the process, the packaging materials are also extracted for recycling – hundreds of tonnes of cardboard and plastics are collected and recycled per month from food manufacturers, and tailor-made surplus food handling installations are designed and built to suit each individual factory.
So when you’re next wondering what happens to loaves of bread in supermarkets that have reached their best before date, or the batch of biscuits that was rejected from the factory, it may well be travelling past you in an ABN lorry on the motorway, in the form of SugaRich biscuit meal, having been incorporated into pig or poultry feed at an ABN mill.
This clever process offers a viable, sustainable and economically beneficial solution to all major food businesses and is a great example of taking downgraded or surplus products from one industry and using it to benefit another. It is also environmentally friendly for the British farming industry, and a cost-effective way to feed pigs and poultry.
Find out more on the new SugaRich website - http://www.sugarich.co.uk/
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