What we’re producing at Nutreco Exploration is always complex, never a single ingredient. Our PhytoComplexes use the whole plant or complete plant extract, fully utilising the amazing power of nature to help animals overcome the complex challenges they face today.

Nutreco Exploration’s Director of Development and Deployment
The medicinal plant solutions center, which started construction in Switzerland in September 2023 and is called Nutreco’s Garden of the Future, offers promising clues on sustainable animal nutrition.
Nutreco, as a company seeking solutions to today’s important problems such as increasing global food production, limiting the use of antibiotics, reducing the environmental impact of animal production, and improving animal welfare, seems to add a new dimension to its strong position in the animal nutrition industry with its work in this center focused on completely natural ingredients.
According to the company, the phytotechnology team at Nutreco’s Garden of the Future facility in Switzerland is breaking new ground every day, both literally and figuratively. Dr. Emma Wall, Nutreco Exploration’s Director of Development and Deployment, explains more about the new facility and this groundbreaking work.Dr. Wall is a physiologist by training who has spent her whole career in the livestock botanical space. In her current role, Dr. Wall and her team focus on maintaining a strong connection between Nutreco’s business lines, Trouw Nutrition and Skretting, and the Nutreco Exploration team to help ensure the solutions the company develops precisely fit the needs of farmers. This is only one of many things that makes Nutreco Exploration’s approach to PhytoComplexes very different from anything we’ve seen in the industry to date; it’s unique not only in terms of their development process, which veers away from traditional R&D to focus solely on business needs but also the science, which, according to Dr. Wall, required an important mindset shift.
FULLY UTILISING THE AMAZING POWER OF NATURE…
Traditionally, the phytotechnology industry has mainly taken a pharmaceutical approach to product development, only utilising extractions that could be completely isolated and identified. Products were often made up of synthetic chemicals; for example, instead of using the essential oil of cinnamon, companies would use synthetic cinnamaldehyde. “This approach required knowing exactly which chemical was responsible for the effect produced, and it trivialised the power of traditional medicine,” says Dr. Emma Wall. “What we’re producing at Nutreco Exploration is always complex, never a single ingredient. Our PhytoComplexes use the whole plant or complete plant extract, fully utilising the amazing power of nature to help animals overcome the complex challenges they face today.”
This approach required Wall and some of the other experts on the team to shift their mindset. “We had to train ourselves to really respect nature,” says Dr. Wall. “These compounds are put together in plants for a reason – when you start taking them apart, you lose bioefficacy. So, we’re trying to not only respect the observation of what we see in these plants, these PhytoComplexes but also respect that they’re meant to be together.”
“And we’re confident our customers will see how effective our approach is when they start to use these products because the PhytoComplexes we are creating are totally different from traditional phytotechnology; they work by improving an animal’s systems to boost its resilience. The Nutreco Exploration team looks at the weak points in an animal, such as gut integrity or inflammation, and figures out how we can use a PhytoComplex to hit those targets,” explains the company team.
EXPERT TEAM IN PHYTOTECHNOLOGY
The role of Dr. Wall’s team within Nutreco Exploration is to stay close to Nutreco’s business lines and its customers to ensure everything the company works on creates value. The company explains that the Nutreco Exploration team only works on projects that fit existing business needs and address specific challenges the company has identified – never on concepts that may be interesting but have no business accountability. This is dependent on the team constantly cultivating relationships to help the company understand the needs of customers. One might come to Nutreco with a vague idea of a problem they need to have solved, and after multiple conversations to understand more, they start working with their phytochemists to get down to a molecular level. The team is a powerhouse of expertise, with people who have 10 to 30-plus years of expertise in phytotechnology.
The Nutreco Exploration team is the company’s empowerment tool for its two business lines. “The team couldn’t exist without this business connection,” says Dr. Wall. “We’re not replacing our R&D teams; we want to empower them throughout the product development process with knowledge, tools, and these PhytoComplexes that can help them address customers’ issues in new and exciting ways. Our business lines continue to own the product and the trials. We involve them in the discovery phase as soon as we have a positive result.” This unique approach creates value for livestock and aquatic species, for Nutreco’s customers, and for them. “Nutreco is really making history with our Garden of the Future, and we believe it will change the industry as we know it,” states the Nutreco team.
The grand opening of the facility will take place this spring, with a media day on June 5 and a customer tour on June 6.