ADM’s Pierre-Joseph Paoli shares his views on how ingredient and additive life cycle assessments help determine, improve feed sustainability
Life cycle assessment (LCA), or life cycle analysis, gauges the environmental impact associated with all stages of a commercial products. These metrics will grow increasingly valuable as animal protein producers look to reduce their footprint and look to animal feed formulations to help them do so.
ADM Animal Nutrition‘s president of feed additives and ingredients, Pierre-Joseph Paoli joins the Chat to discuss how LCA will allow consumers and downstream customers to make more environmentally conscious decisions.
Exploring how ingredient lifecycle analysis can improve feed sustainability from WATT Global Media on Vimeo.
Transcription of Feed Strategy Chat with Pierre-Joseph Paoli, president – feed additives and ingredients, ADM Animal Nutrition
Jackie Roembke, editor in chief, WATT Feed Brands/Feed Strategy: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Feed Strategy Chat. I’m your host, Jackie Roembke, editor in chief of WATT Feed Brands and Feed Strategy magazine.
This edition of Feed Strategy Chat is brought to you by WATT Global Media and FeedStrategy.com. FeedStrategy.com is your source for the latest news and leading-edge analysis of the global animal feed industry.
Today we’re joined on Zoom by Pierre-Joseph Paoli, ADM Animal Nutrition’s president for feed additives and ingredients. He’s here to talk about how ingredient lifecycle analysis can improve feed sustainability.
Hi, Pierre-Joseph, how are you?
Pierre-Joseph Paoli, president – feed additives and ingredients, ADM Animal Nutrition: Jackie, thanks for having me.
Roembke: Excellent. Thank you so much for your time. Well, let’s get right into it. How are companies currently assessing the environmental impact of their feed additives and ingredients?
Paoli: So I think what we’re doing is really not so different from what’s happening in the other industries. We look at very standard processes both for the LCA themselves, as well as assessing the intensity or the absolute emissions of the additives.
What maybe is a little bit different about feed additives versus some other products is that while, of course, we look at scope one and scope two, the scope three, which is the emissions afterwards in the value chain, tend to be negative with the feed additives. And that is very interesting, because it means there’s a return on environmental investment, if you will, for those kinds of products.
Roembke: In the future, how may these metrics or different techniques of measurement evolve to better gauge the sustainability issue?
Paoli: I think they will converge across the different industries and that’s probably a good thing. Because we don’t want to have measurements which are not consistent across the different platforms where we work.
Roembke: Please describe the insights and value feed ingredient life cycle analysis adds to feed production.
Paoli: You have to see that the feed additive exists today because they bring a return on investment for the user, be that the farmer or the integrators. So when we do the lifecycle analysis is we’re putting the data around this and, really, what we’re saying is the performance and the environmental sustainability are just two sides of the same coin.
If you can manage more production with the same amount of inputs, or if you manage to have more production with the same inputs, then actually, you’re contributing to sustainability. So again, the main difference between the feed additives and maybe some of the other products that are around is that as you use them, you’re able to reduce your scope through emissions.
Pierre-Joseph Paoli will present his talk, “How feed ingredient analysis supports a more sustainable value chain,” at the 2022 VIV LIVE Feed Congress on May 30. Register today: https://bit.ly/3v36JxO
Roembke: Very good. What should feed manufacturers and nutritionists look for when trying to evaluate or determine the sustainability efforts of their supply chain partners?
Paoli: That is relatively complex at the moment because there’s a lot of information available and I think what the formulators are doing at the moment is they’re really trying to establish the base from which they’re working from. Understand with these new parameters, what is it that they have with the feed that they’re trying to produce, then afterwards their companies will define some targets. Hopefully this will be broken down and detailed enough that they can construct an action plan.
What we can do in the value chain is we can provide them the information that they’re looking for so then they can build this plan and at the same time we help them achieve their targets. At the end of the day, their success will also be our success in providing them with the materials, but also the information that they need.
Roembke: Any tips for how that can be leveraged for reducing or improving their environmental footprint?
Paoli: At the moment, we are doing the things ourselves for our own products and we are discovering some interesting facts because the products were not necessarily optimized around their environmental footprint, even though they were, as I mentioned before, optimized already around their environmental impact.
The other thing that we that we see — and where ADM is part of the Responsible Meat Initiative (ReMI) — I think this is a very interesting example of something that’s happening right now with a lot of places in the value chain. And so we get together, we define a set of criteria on which we want to work, and then we set some targets for each of these criteria. And as we go along in the chain, then we help each other meet our own targets. That’s a very practical way of doing things.
This is at the moment very focused on pork production. Hopefully, we will extend it a little bit afterwards, and I wish that it will be successful on the on the pig production. The next target that we’re looking at is poultry production.
Roembke: Very good. There’s a lot of international public interest in sustainability in animal agriculture, and in turn, feed production. How can the feed industry communicate these sustainability efforts to their downstream customers?
Paoli: That’s a very interesting question. And I will go back again to my example, with the Responsible Meat Initiative. We have a piece which is about consumer engagement, and I think this is what drives the value chain. So we need to engage the consumers into understanding the choices that they’re making at the point of purchase. And then to do that, as a value chain, we need to provide them reliable information about what it is that they are doing when they’re purchasing one product versus another. This is extremely important and the information right now is quite fragmented. So it’s also a very exciting part of the work and we participate in it, of course, as companies, but as individual purchasers, it’s also close to our heart to understand how these things work.
Roembke: Excellent. Thank you so much for those insights. If you are interested in a deep dive on some of the concepts that Pierre-Joseph presented here — and you’ll be in Utrecht for VIV Europe — consider joining us at the European LIVE Feed Congress on May 30. Here, Pierre-Joseph’s presentation, “How feed ingredient analysis supports a more sustainable value chain,” will be presented with a full panel of other experts discussing sustainability and feed role.
For more information, visit feedstrategy.com/feed-strategy-events. Thank you so much, Pierre Joseph, and thanks to you for tuning in.
Paoli: Thank you, Jackie.
