The company said it will be working with the well-established Portland-based, Mercury Commodities, to develop the UK market and, doing so, cover the bulk of the leading feed compounders’ raw material needs.
“We have the grains and access to the ports but we don’t have UK feed market knowledge and experience, and that is where Mercury, which is already handling wheat distillers and maize gluten, steps in,” said James Maw, managing director of Glencore Grain UK.
The company said dedicated import facilities and a direct distribution channel into the UK, will give integrated poultry producers, cattle and pig feed compounders a “fully accredited and assured supply chain” for protein meals from crush to market.
The business is targeting the prime livestock producing centers of the UK, including the major pig and poultry markets of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Humberside, along with cattle production in the south-west, north-west and Scotland.
'Competitive' supply chain
Glencore Agri, part of Glencore Plc, is one of the world’s major crushers of soy bean and oilseed rape, and producers of crush co-products: “We already supply protein meals including soybean meal, hulls and palm kernel expeller to mainland European countries such as Italy, Hungary, Spain, Poland and the Netherlands, so it makes sense to include the UK, and we can leverage synergy on freight costs,” said Maw.
He said co-products of the crush will be readily and consistently available for UK buyers, through large-scale panamax deep water ports, in Portland, Dorset on the south coast and new bespoke import and storage facilities at Teesport in the North East.
And the protein meal proteins will be priced advantageously, said Maw. “We wouldn’t have set up this business if we didn’t think we could be competitive. We are also actively increasing our crush output, and so will have more product to sell. We are a major global producer of protein meal ourselves so we can dictate price,” he told FeedNavigator.
Glencore Agri is a vertically-integrated business focused on the trading of wheat, corn and barley along with soybeans, rice, sugar, pulses and cotton. It involves a network of origination and logistics assets, comprising storage and processing facilities and ports, strategically located worldwide.
In June this year, Glencore Plc agreed to sell just-under a 10% stake in its agriculture unit to Canada’s British Columbia Investment Management Corp. for $624.9m in a ongoing strategy to reduce debt. It already sold a 40% stake in the unit to the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) in April.