Pancosma & Associates’ biggest corporate event of the year, the Pancosma Annual Reunion (PAR), was held in Montreux, Switzerland, from March 14 – 17. The four-day event featured an impressive lineup of invited speakers from the field of animal nutrition, along with Pancosma’s own technical experts, sales and marketing teams. Seminars and workshops provided a comprehensive overview of the latest product development in the context of the cutting edge research in animal nutrition.
The first edition of the PAR was entitled “Building on legacy, introducing non-nutrition.” During his opening speech, Dr. Goetz Gotterbarm, CEO of Pancosma & Associates, highlighted the company’s rich history of research and innovation, and outlined the future direction of the company by growing on the foundations of its legacy.
PAR 2016 also provided a platform for Pancosma to unveil its next generation of functional feed additives based on the non-nutrition approach, the NEX range. Earlier this year in February, Pancosma launched the non-nutrition concept, a new addition to its series of concepts for animal nutrition. Non-nutrition builds on the legacy of the revolutionary “Gut Effects” concept first developed by the company, and promoted as Intelligent Gut Action®.
This novel concept reveals the increasingly important role of a category of dietary compounds, called non-nutrients, and their effects, which extend beyond the benefits of nutrients to positively impact animal productivity. Nutrients, such as proteins, amino acids, and minerals, provide the building blocks and energy for an organism to grow. On the other hand, non-nutrients do not have an impact on the nutritional content of feed. Instead, they enhance productivity through non-nutritional mechanisms, resulting in the regulation of the immune and endocrine systems, metabolism, and the gut microflora. Therefore, non-nutrients, defined as substances with no nutritional value, can be integrated into nutritional strategies, to optimize the animal diet, maximize productivity and performance, and lower feed costs.
The translation of the non-nutrition concept into effective feed additives to optimize animal production resulted in the NEX range. The first two products in this range are NexUlin and NexTend, designed for peri-peak application to fuel milk production while optimizing feed efficiency in dairy cows, and to maintain stable egg production during the end of the laying period in laying hens, respectively.