FRAmelco is a family owned multinational group, headquartered in The Netherlands, with three plants located in The Netherlands, Spain and Thailand.
Adisseo declined to release the financial details of the deal. It said all FRAmelco employees will be retained.
With gross sales of around €30m per year, most of FRAmelco’s sales are linked to its glycerides – short and medium chain fatty acids – portfolio, along with its lysolecithins offer, reported Adisseo.
Lysolecithins are said to improve fat digestion by the promotion of an oil-in-water emulsification in the aqueous environment of the gastrointestinal tract.
The FRAmelco plant in Spain manufactures glycerides and lysolecithin, while the Dutch and Thai plants blend glycerides and lysolecithin with other ingredients to make final products.
Quality control is done in the laboratory of each site, said François Pellet, executive director, specialties SBU, Adisseo.
Short and medium chain fatty acids
Glycerides of short and medium chain fatty acids (SCFA and MCFA) have huge market potential because they can be used in substitution of antibiotic growth promoters (AGPs) to enhance animal resilience as well as improving animal performance, said Pellet.
“Their efficacy has been proven in many species: poultry, swine, calves, rabbit and some aqua species,” he said.
In terms of how the FRAmelco portfolio complements the range of SCFA and MCFA based products Adisseo acquired through its takeover of the Nutriad business in late 2017, Tim Goossens, global scientific and technical manager, Adisseo told us:
“Through the acquisition of Nutriad, Adisseo acquired a range of sodium butyrate-based products, including one where butyrate was embedded in a protective fat matrix with a specific butyrate release profile in vivo.
“FRAmelco’s glycerides have different physical characteristics, but even more important, they will deliver their active components in different regions of the digestive tract, thereby instigating other physiological responses. In addition, SCFA and MCFAs have distinct modes of actions, which is, for example, reflected by the way they affect gastro-intestinal microbiota. Our new portfolio will therefore allow us to offer more precise and practical solutions to several challenges and opportunities for livestock producers.”
Giving us a deeper dive into the benefits of such products for farmed animals, Goossens explained that short and medium chain fatty acids occupy a “special place” in the digestive tract ecology.
“Rather than being acidifiers, as the name would suggest, they are recognized by different cell types in intestinal and extra-intestinal tissue as signaling molecules. More specifically, through binding to specific receptors and their intracellular and intramicrobial working mechanisms, they are able to stimulate gut development and integrity, as well as directly and indirectly modulating immune responses and gut microbial composition.”
