September 6, 2007

Feed Management Systems new "track and trace software" may help feedmillers

The Bioterrorism Act of 2002 Animal feed and human food manufacturers implemented in the US is required to keep records of the source of their ingredients and produce the records in 24 hours if the Food and Drug Administration demands them. However, the law has been used not to prevent bioterrorism but to root out inferior Chinese feed products. Track-and-trace software, which got a marketing boost after 9/11 terrorist attacks and the 2003 mad cow disease outbreak, might benefit further from the more recent Chinese food and feed contamination, said Richard Reynertson, chief executive officer of Feed Management Systems.

Reynertson said the Chinese stigma may be longer than expected and that the US is very vulnerable to contamination as food supply is very open to tampering. However, monitoring the food supply with good people, processes and technology can ease the situation, he said.

The system is also being used by agribusiness giant Cargill, which under an April agreement is recommending the software company's products to customers of its agricultural consulting services. Cargill said it decided to recommend Feed Management Systems because it also has a strong suite of feed mill business programs tightly integrated with Microsoft's accounting software.

According to Bill Mead, Cargill's North American regional director for consulting and animal nutrition, the track-and-trace capability is a big help in the feed business for both government and private companies wanting to protect their reputations in terms of food safety.

There may be more track-and-trace software customers as feed mills push to save money by switching from paper record-keeping to computerized management, he said.

The price of the Feed Management Systems' track and trace software depends on the size of the feed mill, but typically is US$50,000 to license the software plus US$10,000 to US$15,000 a year for software maintenance fees, Reynertson said.

The company's software is used in about 200 of the nearly 3,000 US feed mills, he said. The target market is 640 of those feed mills that produce more than 40,000 tonnes of feed annually. Reynertson said track-and-trace software isn't a big seller on its own, but instead has helped sell his firm's full suite of software, which the company claims will pay for itself through increased efficiency in about a year.