Aquafeed: high quality fish feed at low cost per ton

The fish feed market: current situation and forecast

Lately, aquafeed has been booming. The growing world population has an ever increasing demand for food. Fish plays an increasingly important role as a source of vital proteins. In the past 50 years, the global fish consumption per capita has doubled, from around 10 kg/year in the sixties, to nearly 20 kg/year nowadays.
In order to supply to this increasing demand, fish farms come in; farms that breed fish for the purpose of consuming. In this scenario, aquafeed plays an essential, central role, as a high quality source of protein for fish production.

The rising demand for fish makes high quality aquafeed (protein content, feed quality, shelf life, homogeneity, etc.) more important than ever.

Fish feed producers face substantial challenges in meeting required quality and demand

The biggest challenge regarding aquafeed is the preservation of nutrients. For fish to be truly nutritious for the end-consumers, high quality, high protein feed is required. Currently, two issues impair the ability to produce the required feed:

› There is a shortage of protein resources. Most of the soybean, fish oil and fish meal used in aquafeed is imported, and linked to that;

› Many drying technologies can only handle a narrow, pre-set product type, which greatly reduces feed variety and volume that can be produced in a feed plant

Altogether, more often than not, feed producers and fish farms are faced with sub-optimal feed products, being both too low in protein content, as well as too low in quality in terms of uniformity, shelf life, particle size, and more. Solving these problems for feed producers means an immediate increase in production volumes and fish quality. And this, in turn, leads to higher margins for the aquafeed industry. How? Through higher prices for higher quality feed, combined with a lower cost per ton produced.

We help fish farms achieve high quality aquafeed, at low cost per ton, across a wide range of product types

Ventilex is a world leading manufacturer of custom designed fluid bed dryers for the food and feed industry globally. With over 50 years of experience and an installed base of over 1,000 units in over 80 countries, we possess great experience in the thermal treatment of fish feed products. Having worked with aquafeed producers worldwide, our thermal drying equipment has been fine-tuned particularly for fish feed. This results into significant benefits for fish feed producers:

• Product range: Ventilex is able to facilitate the drying of a wide range of feed products (particle size, density, moisture content, geometry, etc.) on one and the same machine. This includes the ability to dry micro feed, with a particle size below 2 mm
• Cost: our equipment is capable of achieving very high production volumes, significantly lowering the cost per ton feed produced
• Quality: specifically tailored process parameters, based on each specific feed product, allow for gentle, yet efficient drying that preserves precious nutrients in the feed particles
• Homogeneity: a highly uniform and deep into the core dried feed product, achieving much higher shelf life than with traditional drying units
• Hygiene: our fluid bed dryers do not have internal crevices, undercuts or mechanical components which attract product (dust) sediments, thus avoiding contamination
• Ready to go: our dryers combine a heat treatment for drying, combined with subsequent cooling zone in one machine, making the product ready-to-go at machine exit

The benefits listed are achieved through Ventilex’ deep knowledge of feed products and deliver unrivalled benefits to fish feed producers, allowing higher volumes, higher quality and lower costs.