Feed & Ration

Know what an animal feed supplier offer is really worth

Your formulation software knows one price for soybean meal. Your supplier just offered you a different one.

A supplier offers you soybean meal at €12 a tonne below your usual price. On paper, it's the better deal. But the protein is 45.5% instead of the 47% you normally buy.

Is it still the better deal?

Most buyers can't answer that on the spot. And most formulation software can't help, because it works with one standard price and one standard quality per raw material. A specific offer, with its own price and its own quality, has nowhere to go. So it gets judged on price per tonne, a quick protein calculation, or gut feeling.

If that sounds familiar, it's a sign your software is holding you back.

The cheapest offer isn't always the cheapest formula

Raw materials aren't interchangeable simply because they share the same name. Protein, energy, amino acids, fibre and moisture vary between suppliers and lots. Each one affects how much of an ingredient your formulas can use, and what has to be balanced elsewhere.

Take the two soybean meal offers:

Offer	Crude protein	Price per tonne	Price per kg protein
New supplier	45.5%	€388	€0.853
Usual supplier	47%	€400	€0.851

Prices are illustrative.

Per tonne, the new offer is €12 cheaper. Per kilo of protein, the two are practically a draw.

So what decides it? Everything a quick calculation leaves out:

how each offer fits the amino acid and energy requirements of your formulas
whether the lower protein means using more soybean meal, or topping up with a more expensive protein source
whether your formulas have room for the extra volume
and all of that across every formula and every plant that uses soybean meal, not just one

That isn't a purchasing calculation. It's a formulation one.

Evaluate the offer before you sign

BESTMIX Raw Material Contract Management is designed to close that gap. It works inside BESTMIX Multiblend, which optimizes your formulas together, across plants, instead of one at a time.

When a supplier calls, the buyer enters the offer as a potential contract, with its own price, quality and quantity. Your live ingredient data stays untouched. Run the optimization, and you see:

whether the offer is worth buying, and how much of it
what it does to demand for every other raw material
how best to split it across your plants, on cost rather than habit

If the numbers work, you buy and register the contract in your ERP. If they don't, you've lost nothing.

Contracts you've already signed come in from your ERP with their actual price and quality. Your formulas then run on what you really bought, not on averages.

The best deal shows up in the finished formula

Raw material markets will keep moving. You can't control every price change, supplier offer or shift in quality. But you can control how you judge them.

When purchasing and formulation work from the same numbers, a supplier offer stops being a negotiation over price. It becomes an optimization decision, weighing cost, nutritional value and production requirements together, before anyone signs.

Because in feed manufacturing, the best raw material deal isn't the one with the lowest price tag. It's the one that delivers the best value in the finished formula.

This is sign 5 of 8 in our whitepaper Beyond least-cost formulation: what modern feed software should help you see, solve and act on.

Download the whitepaper