During VICTAM Asia 2026, co-located with Animal Health and Nutrition Asia in Bangkok, Feed Strategy spoke with exhibitors about the trends and challenges shaping the region's feed sector. In this interview, Paola Laghetti, export manager for the South Pacific region at Italian pelleting equipment manufacturer La Meccanica, discusses how geopolitical disruption and shifting raw material availability are driving demand for adaptable equipment, why aquafeed has grown from a niche into a core market, and how automation can help small and medium feed mills improve energy efficiency and overcome the shortage of skilled operators.
Interview with Paola Laghetti, export manager, La Meccanica
Jackie Roembke: Hi, everyone. Jackie Roembke here, reporting from VICTAM Asia, also co-located with Animal Health and Nutrition Asia. So today, we are going to share some of the conversations that we had with exhibitors here at the exhibition in Bangkok, Thailand.
Paola Laghetti, export manager, La Meccanica: Hi, my name is Paola, and I'm the export manager for the South Pacific area for La Meccanica. La Meccanica is an Italian company that will turn 65 years old this year. We have been making pellet machine dies and rollers since almost forever, let's say. Besides the pellet machine, we do the full pellet line — hammer mills, mixers, coolers — anything that you need to complete your animal feed plant.
Roembke: How are you tailoring your solutions for the range of operations common in Southeast Asia, from large integrated producers down to smaller independent mills?
Laghetti: There are challenges every day, for many different reasons. With the current geopolitical situation, every day you have to change the route, and you have to adapt your way of traveling or transporting your goods. And this also affects the way that the final user produces their own product. Let's talk about raw materials. The raw material can be available on site, but sometimes it has to be imported. And if there is any critical situation at a given moment, they have to adapt their formula according to the situation.
When they adapt the formula, there is a follow-up effect: if the formula changes, most of the time the dies change, or the process changes. So the biggest challenge is to sell something that can be adaptable every single day, since times are changing and can sometimes be very unpredictable.
Roembke: Aquafeed is a dominant and growing sector across the region. How has demand from shrimp, tilapia and other locally important species influenced your product development?
Laghetti: Aquafeed has increased in the past three, four, five years, I would say. At the very beginning, honestly, I was thinking, OK, it won't last long. But then, if you think about our global situation, most people eat mostly fish and chicken — those are the two main animal sectors. So we have to adapt as well and upgrade our production, our technology, to this new slice of the market, which at the beginning was very small in size — like a secondary sector. But right now, it's becoming as important as the cattle or chicken feed producers.
Roembke: Energy efficiency is a major purchasing driver right now. What kind of real-world performance gains are your Southeast Asian customers seeing, and what does a typical ROI timeline look like?
Laghetti: We cannot find a solution to save on the source of energy itself, but we can offer a machine that is reliable, and when you switch it on, it will work. To be more technical: if you switch on and off, on and off — even a TV or a washing machine at your house — it's a waste of energy, because it's going up and down. So our purpose, our main goal as a producer — as for many other competitors as well, for sure — is that once you turn on your machine, it must run without any problem for the time that you need to meet the production target.
Roembke: Automation is changing what feed mill operators need to know and do. How are you approaching that transition with customers in markets where skilled technician availability varies widely?
Laghetti: Automation is still seen as something for the huge, big plants, the super plants, etc. So we have to help people understand that even in small to medium animal feed operations, automation doesn't mean that you have a robot running your machine. Automation is something where you set the parameters, you set the target of your production, and — as we were saying, energy is very important — this is what will help you run your machine in the most efficient way, without wasting time and electric power.
And on the other hand, it's not always easy to find skilled people to run the machines, because it takes time to get experience. Especially if you have young people with mechanical backgrounds or whatever, they need something to support them — they cannot know everything about the whole line from the very beginning. So automation will help the owner instruct their workers to run the machine in the best way possible.
Roembke: Looking at the next 12 months, what's the biggest shift you expect in demand from Southeast Asian feed manufacturers — and are you already responding to it?
Laghetti: I really would like to have an idea, but as I said, the current times are so unpredictable that it's hard to make a forecast. What is most important is really to pay attention to your current clients — what is the gap in the market, what do they need? And this will lead you to the next step. Listen to their demand. This is the only thing I can say.