The shift in feed-tech priorities: What's driving poultry companies to change

The protein shift is not simply a story about people eating more animal protein. It is a story about which protein they are choosing, and why chicken is winning across virtually every major market.

The economy is straightforward. A broiler converts roughly 1.8 kg of feed into 1 kg of meat. A pig requires around 2.9 kg. A beef animal needs closer to 7 kg. That efficiency gap translates directly into retail price, and consumers notice. As urban populations grow across Asia, Africa, and Latin America and consumers enter the middle class, chicken is typically one of the first animal proteins they can afford to eat regularly.

This trend has global reinforcement, and recent industry data makes the direction clear. Alltech's 2026 global survey shows broiler feed production growing by 3.7%, outpacing total feed growth of 2.9%. OECD-FAO projections reinforce the pattern, pointing to continued dietary shifts toward poultry products across both developed and developing markets.

For poultry producers, the significance is not simply that demand is growing. More poultry means more pressure to produce efficiently at scale, while managing increasingly complex feeding programs, volatile ingredient markets and tighter margins.

That operational transition is where the real challenge lies.

Volume growth alone would be manageable. The harder challenge is that poultry operates under a demanding combination of biological and economic constraints.

Broilers have short production cycles, which compresses decision timelines throughout the chain. Feed efficiency is critical: a 0.05 improvement in feed conversion ratio across a large broiler operation can represent a meaningful margin difference at current ingredient costs. Poultry producers are also highly exposed to volatile raw materials such as corn, soybean meal, fats and amino acids, where price swings can make a formulation economically optimal one week and costly the next.

This combination of speed, sensitivity to formulation precision and ingredient volatility creates a demanding operational reality. Decisions that could once be made on a weekly or monthly cycle increasingly need to happen in days or hours. The cost of a suboptimal formulation or a delay in responding to a price movement compound quickly across high-volume, short-cycle production.

For poultry producers, the challenge is therefore not simply to formulate at least cost. It is to make the right formulation decision quickly, understand its implications for the rest of the operation, and put that decision into production without unnecessary delay.

The emerging requirement is not simply better formulation software or better plant management software. It is better coordination between the two.

Consider a sudden increase in soybean meal prices. A nutritionist may quickly find an alternative formulation, but is the substitute ingredient available? Does its latest quality analysis support the values used in formulation? Can production accommodate the change? And can the revised feed be released quickly enough to capture the saving?

When formulation, quality, purchasing and production operate separately, every handoff introduces delay.

This is where BESTMIX® helps poultry producers move from isolated optimization to connected decision-making.

By connecting recipe management with quality, production and wider business processes, BESTMIX helps teams evaluate changes faster and turn formulation decisions into executable production decisions.

Poultry nutrition also means managing complete feeding programs, not isolated formulas.

Starter, grower and finisher diets each have different nutritional and economic objectives, but together they determine the performance and economics of the same bird.

The same principle applies across the operation. Ingredient prices, nutritional requirements, quality results and production constraints are interconnected. The technology supporting those decisions should be too.

BESTMIX is built specifically for the nutrition and feed industries, helping poultry producers manage formulation and feeding programs while connecting the information needed across the wider feed operation.