Individual feeds for aquaculture may contain up to 50 macro- and micro-ingredients to ensure the specific nutritional requirements are met. With over 1,000 ingredients currently in the global portfolio, Skretting‘s global procurement team, headquartered in Stavanger, Norway, is now at full capacity.
“In general, our objective is to support our operating companies to procure as best as they can,” said Robert van den Breemer, Skretting procurement director. “We are a united and diverse team, in touch with the needs and requirements of Skretting customers and colleagues in commercial, marketing, research and quality. We have strong relationships with suppliers and will lead the way in sustainability and the utilization of data.”
With close ties to Skretting Aquaculture Research Centre (ARC), the team is also streamlining the insertion of new ingredients into the systems and therefore feeds. “We have a dedicated team member specifically focused on bringing new ingredients on stream, working closely together with expert researchers and also our suppliers to ensure ingredients fit for purpose,” continued van den Breemer.
The central procurement team now consists of five category managers, who track the market and work closely with key suppliers to support the purchasing teams in the company’s operating companies with advice on procurement in their category. Last year, Skretting announced the appointment of Jenna Bowyer for novel ingredients, joining Anne-Marie Johnson (vegetable ingredients) and Erik Aanensen (marine ingredients). Since then, Amber Zheng has joined the team to focus on land animal products, in addition to Geert van Houte (functional ingredients).
In addition to the category managers, the team has four project managers working on specific objectives and a data engineer responsible for quality checks and translating data into actionable insights, dashboards and forward-looking procurement information. One of the project managers, Marcel Görmer, will focus on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of ingredients in Skretting feed, which can represent around 96% of the Skretting footprint.
“Doing the right thing in sustainability is a challenge, and Skretting wants to move beyond “more sustainable” and “less sustainable”. We want facts to understand and be able to act on our footprint and help our customers to achieve their sustainability targets. There is so much happening in this space and we see that thoughtful sourcing is of fundamental importance to our business moving forward, not only from a practical but also a sustainability perspective. With the team now in place, in addition to the support of our fantastic global network, I am confident that Skretting can go even further to deliver on our mission of Feeding the Future by providing sustainable feed solutions to our customers around the world,” concluded van den Breemer.
