Melts in Your Mouth, not on Your Brand
…three…two…one, the thundering roar begins, gloriously drowning out the crowd's cheers as the ship strains, lifting her load smoothly skyward. The year is 1982, and the space shuttle's cargo is imperceptibly heavier because the astronauts are bringing something extra. They've picked M&M's as the first candy to blast into space with them. Not a bad choice. No astronaut wants a sticky, gooey, chocolaty mess on his fingers, fouling up his switches and gauges. So the spacemen carry the tasty treats engineered to "melt in your mouth, not in your hands", patented by Forrest Mars, Sr. in 1941. Those spacemen were pressured by G-forces. Today, the feed industry is getting pressured from a different direction.
If you’re feeling squeezed by ingredient cost pressures, you could probably use a little something to sweeten your day. Durable coatings are a good idea for candy, and handy for some vitamin sources too. Commodity inflation’s got us all in a pinch. Higher costs are trickling down, scratch that, gushing down through the supply channels. Global vitamin producers, with their petrochemical manufacturing base, certainly aren’t immune. We’re all at risk because competition for the best price pulls lower-quality ingredients further into the market. Compromises in vitamin quality can show up as poorer stability, especially in naturally unstable nutrients like vitamin A. That’s why you’ll see us working in key vitamin producing regions, committed to quality and consistency, personally researching and validating vitamin manufacturers. Poor vitamin quality can be messy for your reputation, so it pays to understand the risks and protect your customers and your brand.
Decaying vitamins erode customer confidence
In nature, vitamins A, D and E are liquid oils that can have very short life-spans. You and your customers have no worries with Vitamin E stability, because the lion’s share comes from the very-stable synthetic form that carries a tremendously long shelf life. Vitamins A and D, on the other hand, must be well-preserved. When these oils directly contact air, they become rancid just like any unstable vegetable oil or putrid fat. Even if the oils are mixed with starch or some other dry carrier, oxygen makes them decay quickly.
Vitamin A and A/D combination beadlet manufacturers slow down harmful oxidation by mixing the active vitamin oils in a bed of starch, then coating the oily-starch balls with a gelatin solution so no air gets in. When the gelatin dries, it makes a hard coating of protective protein strands around the starch and vitamin. This coating does a good job of protecting the vitamin in dry mash feeds, like those fed to laying hens and breeding swine. But when the vitamin beadlets contact moisture, like in your pellet conditioner or extruder, the moist gelatin protein loosens and melts away, exposing the vitamin to air. Figure 1 (page 2) shows two 45-power photos of vitamin A beadlets; first when dry, then after moistening and melting. You can see the puddle of starch now exposed to the elements. That’s when the pain really begins. Now open to air, moisture and heat, your vitamin decay accelerates like a high-schooler from a stop light.
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Putting the brakes on vitamin decay
Fortunately the decay-police can help you slow it down. Better vitamin technology hardens the gelatin coating, chemically bonding each protein strand to its neighbor. Like strands of a chain-link fence that have been welded together, this crosslinked gelatin coating will not dissolve in boiling water. Look at Figure 1 to compare the well-hardened beadlets; first when dry, then still intact after moistening. The internal vitamins remain concealed, so no oxygen can reach them. As a result, vitamin decay doesn’t accelerate in feed storage, so you and your customers get more of what you both paid for.
As an example of how fast your feed’s vitamin A can disappear if not properly stabilized, see the graph in Figure 2. Both lines are plotted as a percent of the vitamin A remaining through 4 months in manufacturing and storage. The red line represents a poorly-crosslinked vitamin source, while the green line is well-crosslinked. Both sources are quite stable for the first month, while they are still in a vitamin premix and under no stress. The abrupt vitamin loss at the end of the first month was when the feed was mixed and pelleted. This is the point where the stability of the two sources parted ways. The poor beadlets, in red, melted and accelerated their decay so that after three more months in storage, only about 50% of their guarantee remained. The well-crosslinked beadlets, in green, were more stable. At the end of the 4th month, the crosslinked vitamin A source would still pass the AAFCO standard of 30% variation used by most state regulators.
Similarly, hardened beadlets are more durable in mineral mixes, resisting abrasion and shear forces that could otherwise open them up to the harmfully reactive minerals.
Since oxidation can ruin all types of vitamins, another helpful strategy is to add ethoxyquin, an antioxidant preservative. It’s the most cost-effective protection available to reduce the destruction of all vitamins and lower the harmful impact of rancid fats. FDA limits ethoxyquin to 150 ppm in the finished feed, which is half-a-pound of dry Ethoxyquin 66% in each ton.
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top of page A difference you can see
You can even see differences in stability of vitamin A or A/D combination beadlets with your naked eye; a glass of boiling water is all you need. When you boil non-crosslinked beadlets in water they break down, spilling their starch and oily vitamin into the water. It looks like a creamy, light-colored emulsion; a very thin gravy. Well-crosslinked beadlets, on the other hand, survive boiling intact, changing color as they cook but maintaining their individual spherical shapes and holding their contents without clouding the water. It takes the action of the animal’s digestive juices to eat-away the protein coat and release the vitamin from within the crosslinked beadlets.
Lab assay complications
One final point about sophisticated crosslinked beadlets involves lab assays. Since feed regulators and customers sometimes judge your feed quality based on vitamin A assays, it’s important that the labs take care to use a method that breaks down the outer coating completely. If not, they won’t expose and release all of the vitamin for analysis. They’ll fail to detect the vitamin remaining inside some undissolved beadlets and falsely understate the amount of vitamin actually present in your feed.
There are differences among global vitamin manufacturers’ technologies that really impact vitamin A and A/D combination beadlet stability. As vitamin prices inflate, competition to have the lowest cost can drive some suppliers to compromise and accept poorer quality, less durable beadlets. ASP is putting considerable research and lab resources to work for you, seeking out top-quality vitamin supplies. Because the key vitamins are not produced in North America, this necessarily means traveling abroad to validate foreign manufacturers. Our dedication to quality and consistency is as strong as our commitment to protect our relationship with you. Providing you with as stable and dependable a vitamin supply as possible is one of the ways we work behind the scenes, guarding your brand.
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