Poultry Research

The Trouw Nutrition Poultry Research Centre, based in Spain, is a state-of-the-art facility dedicated to basic and applied research in broilers, laying hens and rabbits to support the development of new, sustainable and innovative nutritional solutions.

Trouw Nutrition’s Poultry R&D team includes scientists from around the globe with diverse backgrounds and experience. Each team member has an area of specialisation in either feed evaluation, young chick nutrition, gut health or precision nutrition. This allows us to find novel solutions by working collaboratively on complex industry challenges. Our work is coordinated by a dedicated team of research and farm technicians who specialise in feed production, quality control, animal welfare and statistics.

Programme-based approach to poultry nutrition and production

We have assembled a poultry research team comprised of highly skilled research scientists, research technicians and trained farm technicians who focus on the development and validation of innovative nutritional solutions to address the needs of our broiler, broiler-breeder and laying hen producer partners.

Research areas cover a broad range of industry issues including nutrition (feed), management (farm), and health, intended to develop a programme-based approach to sustainable poultry production.

Basic and applied research studies are being conducted to:

Create nutritional solutions for sustainable, healthy poultry growth while reducing the reliance on antibiotics
Improve early life nutrition during the first four crucial days after chickens hatch with solutions such as ChickCare
Explore the split-feeding concept, in which the feed composition fed to the laying hens differs in the morning from the evening in order to meet more precisely the nutrient requirements of the hen during the egg formation cycle. A great example of sustainable precision nutrition with better performance of laying hens and reduced emission of nitrogen and phosphorus into the environment

Industry-leading R&D facility

At Trouw Nutrition, we take pride in our research facility, unparalleled among our peers for size, quality, capacity, expertise and experience in the poultry sector. The Poultry Research Centre has capacity to house more than 14,000 birds in seven different types of barns dedicated to broilers, rearing pullets and laying hens. Also included is a hatchery unit and a slaughter line to complete the broiler cycle. In addition to the animal facilities are a Research Feed Plant to produce the feed needed for the poultry trials, a small wet chemistry lab, and a microbiology lab used for the health trials. The goal is to meet scientific standards for proper trial design when developing customer-focused innovation projects.