Executive Summary
The International Feed Industry Federation’s (IFIF) 2050 vision is a world with a safe and secure food supply that can meet rising global demand for animal products. Achieving our 2050 vision will require addressing extreme weather pressures and resource constraints that strain global food systems and agricultural markets. Historic improvements in animal nutrition and livestock productivity have played a critical role in making food more affordable and accessible.
At the same time, research including analyses by the World Bank and FAO consistently warns that extreme weather, pests, diseases, and supply chain disruptions are already, and increasingly, driving up producer and consumer costs and food insecurity. Maintaining current productivity and ensuring animal nutrition remains foundational to global food security requires strengthening resilience.
THE FIVE CORE STRATEGIC INSIGHTS FROM THIS PROJECT
- Resilience is by necessity a core business and food security strategy, not a sustainability side issue.
- In many situations, the biggest constraint is not technology or practices, it is misaligned incentives and short-term capital logic.
- Pre-competitive collaboration is a defining advantage for the sector.
- Outcome management is a more valuable operating model than compliance reporting.
- A secure future food system will benefit from diversified regional resilience over hyper-efficiency globalisation
Important solution innovations exist, but their full potential is blocked
The animal nutrition sector already has key innovations that can improve resilience, sustainability, and economic performance across the food system. Advances in feed formulation, new ingredients, improved production practices, and better information systems all hold promise for strengthening the resilience of the animal food chain while supporting continued business success. Yet these innovations are often implemented in ways that deliver only incremental gains. While valuable, they tend to operate as ‘Solution 1.0’ approaches, meaning they improve performance within the constraints of the existing system but are not powerful enough to overcome the persistent structural barriers embedded in it. As a result, the industry captures only a fraction of the value these innovations could ultimately provide.
Where current solution innovations are today:
Doing More With Less:
The feed industry excels at continuous improvements in performance and efficiency driven by adequate feed formulation and management.
Opportunistic Circularity:
Feed is an inherent circularity leader in many ways: opportunistically upcycling many by-products from within agriculture and other industries to deliver quality feed.
Compliance Driven Measurement:
The feed sector has made significant progress in data collection, from formulation systems and mill performance metrics to sustainability reporting and life cycle assessments
Examples of barriers actively blocking full innovation potential:
Economic Value vs. Short-Term Savings
Tight margins force least-cost feed formulations that prioritise immediate savings over long-term value. This focus hinders the adoption of sustainable ingredients that could otherwise enhance supply resilience through water conservation, soil health, and improved farmer well-being.
Circularity: From Opportunity to Intent
Transitioning from basic upcycling to intentional ‘closed-loop’ systems is stalled by short-term ROI demands, fragmented infrastructure that limits investment, and regulatory or safety hurdles regarding by-product use.
Bridging the True Data Gap
The real ‘data gap’ exists because critical information fails to overcome short-term ROI hurdles or foster the collaboration needed for effective decision-making.
What becomes possible when innovations are unblocked
When these structural barriers are removed, the same innovations can evolve into more powerful ‘Solution 2.0’ approaches that achieve a much greater impact. Instead of isolated improvements, innovations in business models and technologies can scale across the value chain, working together to strengthen the resilience of the entire animal food system. This enables the industry not only to maintain continued business success but also to support broader food safety and food security objectives.
Industry examples already demonstrate that these more advanced versions of existing innovations are both achievable and valuable. The challenge is not a lack of solutions, but rather the removal of the barriers that prevent those solutions from reaching their full potential.
We expand on our 2.0 version below:
THE 2.0 VERSION OF WHAT’S POSSIBLE WHEN WE UNBLOCK THESE SOLUTION INNOVATIONS:
Doing More With Less
High performance: economic, social,
and environmental value creation
We have advanced the performance of the feed industry by optimising for efficiency across social and environmental metrics that support short, medium and long-term economic gains. For example, this high performance, high efficiency model means resilience indicators such as water use and supply risk are now embedded in procurement and formulation decisions alongside cost and productivity metrics. By moving beyond short-term least-cost optimisation, we have strengthened supply security, regulatory readiness, and long-term margin stability to enable continued growth.
Industry examples:
Feed Efficiency
Animal Health
Energy
Opportunistic circularity
Circularity as foundational design
We have shifted from passively using by-products when available to proactively architecting a nutrition system that is circular by default. Through closed-loop engineering we explore ‘waste’ both in our value chain and others at a molecular level. Where molecules can be valuable, we apply upcycling innovation. We are designing our formulas and partnerships specifically to eliminate the need for virgin finite resources. This makes us hyper-efficient and we have decoupled growth from finite resources. This creates superior supply security and cost-stability, particularly in high-risk geographies and for high-risk ingredients.
Industry example:
Circularity
Compliance Driven Measurement
Resilient strategy for short, medium and long-term returns
We have shifted from compliance-driven measurement and reporting on social and environmental metrics to decision-making grounded in the reality that financial capital is completely dependent on social and environmental capital. Strong information flows enables management to embed sourcing risk, water use, emissions, and labor considerations directly into procurement, formulation, and commercial decisions. As a result, we have strengthened margin protection, improved cash flow stability, costs stability (or even costs reduction), market access, and investment discipline.
Industry example:
Voluntary Market Enhancements
Persistent system-level barriers are holding solutions back
The examples above illustrate how innovations are often prevented from evolving from Solution 1.0 into Solution 2.0. These challenges consistently trace back to four persistent system-level barriers shown below. These barriers arise from the way the current system is structured and operates, reflecting the incentives, processes, and relationships embedded throughout the value chain. Together, they limit the industry's ability to achieve system-wide continuous improvement.
These challenges consistently trace back to four persistent system-level barriers.
The Four Persistent System-level Barriers
Primary action barrier
Short term ROI requirements:
Legacy 20th century business case approaches are starving the innovations required to address critical issues like water scarcity. This isn't just a lack of prevention; it is a compounding liability.
Barriers to value chain actions
Policy fragmentation and regulatory complexity:
Conflicting trade policies and overly complex regulations prohibit a pre-competitive approach to addressing critical issues, erode trust in supply chains, and constrain actions and progress.
Mandates instead of teamwork
Lack of recognition for proactive action:
The value of efforts to address unintended impacts (e.g., water quality, GHG emissions) is rarely rewarded. Instead, feed can face mandates to address them at their own cost.
Volatility, instability and uncertainty
Reactive survivalism: Geopolitical shocks and climate-driven disruptions are the new norms. This compounding instability results in defensive, reactive decision-making to mitigate risks and challenges in long-term planning. Focusing solely on short-term survival, organisations are forfeiting the proactive optimisation required to build resilience.
Using leveragE to knock down persistent barriers and secure our food supply
Addressing these structural barriers requires system-level leverage rather than isolated initiatives. The most powerful opportunities lie in strengthening collaboration across the value chain, aligning market incentives, diversifying supply systems, and embedding resilience into decision-making processes.
Our strongest leverage points for overcoming structural barriers and delivering a safe food supply chain are securing end-to-end value through cross-value-chain, pre-competitive collaborations, reinforced by globally consistent policies and regulations. At the same time, we progress diverse supply chains for portfolio-style resilience. Moving from ‘measurement’ to ‘outcome management’ is a key enabler. This is illustrated in the graphic below and explored in more depth on the following pages.
Key Levers to Pull Along The Road to 2050 to create a resilient, united value chain
Securing End-to-End Value Creation
From siloed pilots to scaled value through shared resilience:
- Sharing costs through industry alliances
- Market enhancement
- Policy and regulations
- Resilience through diversity
Managing Outcomes
From measurement to management:
- Enabling internalising the externalised costs driving crises
- Getting information to the right decision makers
- Sharing it in a way that they will act on