After my recent attendance at the European Symposium on Poultry Nutrition (ESPN 2025) in Maastricht, the Netherlands, I wanted to share my impressions from several presentations that left a strong impact. I was genuinely enthused to see renewed focus on the fundamentals of poultry nutrition – core principles that are too often overlooked in the pursuit of novelty.
More specifically, I attended a session dedicated to poultry nutrient requirements, feed specifications and feeding recommendations. These three terms are frequently used interchangeably, yet they refer to distinct concepts with different implications for feed formulation and on-farm performance. In this blog, I’d like to clarify these terms and offer some critical perspective on how they are used – and misused – in practice.
