Interview with Jesper Hedegaard Clausen

Jesper Hedegaard Clausen is Director for Global Aquaculture Nutrition & Support at De Heus.

AQ: Please tell us about yourself. What has been your journey in aquafeeds? How did you get to where you are today?

JHC: I am currently working for De Heus as director for Global Aquaculture Nutrition & Support based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. I have lived and worked in Southeast Asia for more than 20 years and have had the pleasure to work for universities, government and the last seven years in the feed industry. I love aquaculture and all the challenges and opportunities we have in our industry. Feed is very important in aquaculture, and the feed sector has a great opportunity to help develop more efficient feed and feed application programs to benefit the producers of fish and shrimp. Aquaculture produces safe, healthy and wholesome food for consumers across the world, and it is great to be part of this sector and to support its development.

AQ: De Heus has been producing feeds and feed components for more than a century. How did it all start?

JHC: On April 28, 1911, Hendrik Anthonie de Heus founded H.A. de Heus grain and flour merchant. From the start of De Heus’ business in 1911, we have always valued local businesses and their heritage as a strong foundation to drive sustainable growth. The respect and understanding of the independent local farmers are a couple of the key explanations for De Heus growth and success. Today De Heus is still a family-owned company. As our two CEO’s, Koen and Co De Heus say

“Every day, we work towards creating better access to safe and healthy food for a growing world population. We do so by providing our customers with the products and services they need to look after their animals and manage the sustainable development of their businesses.”.

Today, De Heus has more than 10,000 employees worldwide and is one of the largest feed mills in the world in terms of volume feed produced. The entrepreneurial spirit and respect for the independent farmers are still fundamentals and part of the De Heus “DNA”.

AQ: With the acquisition of a feed mill in Vietnam in 2011, De Heus entered the aquafeed industry and has been expanding across different markets. Where is the company now in terms of size, markets served and aquafeed volume?

JHC: Entering into the aquafeed market was a strategic decision by De Heus. The strong growth expectations in aquaculture production globally and the nature of the aquaculture industry as a developing and very innovative industry spoke to the core values in De Heus. The warm water species market was especially seen as an opportunity for us to grow and contribute with our nutritional knowledge and focus on customers. Today, Vietnam is still one of our main aquaculture markets, but we also have production in Indonesia, Myanmar, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, and soon in Uganda. In addition to the countries where we produce, we also serve a number of countries for export.

With the recent (2021) acquisition of the feed activities of Masan Meat Life, there was also a big impact on our aquaculture business. Proconco, which is the leading brand in the domain of aquaculture, was part of this acquisition in the hands of Masan. By the acquisition, as mentioned above, we also took over the Proconco brand, a well-known feed brand in Vietnam, we are getting close to one of our milestones of 1.0 M MT of aquafeed per year. We achieved this with involved and entrepreneurial employees, who continue to develop themselves and we then together take responsibility to realize our vision.

AQ: What are the main challenges you faced while building new factories in these new markets, such as Ivory Coast, Myanmar and Egypt?

JHC: There are always nice challenges when entering new markets and building new factories. In my experience, the main challenge is often to quickly identify a good team in the new business that can lead the process in the country and really understand the customers and the market. Then, the next step is to link the local knowledge and the De Heus global teams with all that experience in nutrition, formulation, understanding raw materials and operations of feed mills. The art is to get that balance right as soon as possible and then you can succeed in any market.

AQ: De Heus is one of the four contestants in the shrimp category of the F3 Challenge – Carnivore Edition, together with Remediiate. What are the main goals achieved so far to get fish-free feeds?

JHC: There is more and more focus on sustainability and traceability in aquaculture, and also in De Heus, we are working on this and trying to continuously do better. Through trials run at our R&D facility on nutrition, we have been able to achieve fish-free feeds for some of our omnivorous fish feed portfolios already.

As a natural next step, we are looking into the carnivorous species and we took the opportunity of the F3 challenge to start with shrimp feed. Shrimp and carnivorous species are more sensitive to fishmeal and fish oil replacement, but we believe with this F3 challenge and some additional research we are conducting, we will achieve an equal growth performance at a competitive price point for these fishfree diets. It is very interesting and something we think can be an important part of the future of aquafeed.

AQ: Sustainability is key to many feed company’s agendas. What plans does De Heus have to lower its carbon footprint or achieve other sustainability goals?

JHC: Our mission is to contribute to the sustainable availability and accessibility of safe and healthy food worldwide. We do this with the utmost care for climate, environment and animal welfare. We encourage every business unit to proactively create more positive values for the environment and the community where we present, depending on the local situation. Besides, we have also decided on a set of four longterm global sustainability ambitions called Global Green Goals for 2030. Reducing our carbon footprint is one of them.

It starts with our ability to measure the GHG emissions of our feed production, not only limited to the emissions of feed processing, but also that of raw material production and relevant logistic activities. The results will suggest detailed actions we must take to reduce the footprint involving using natural resources responsibly and efficiently in our own production, advancing our customers and improving transparency and cooperation throughout the food production chain. This approach will also be applied for our other three Global Green Goals, which are the reduction of antibiotics, the sustainability of soy, and our efforts to help local farmers develop their business. We will also constantly track the general performance of the most important sustainability indicators and the progress of our Global Green Goals to make sure we achieve the goals.

AQ: De Heus, together with Fresh Studio, opened an aquaculture R&D center in Vietnam in 2017. What’s the focus of the center in terms of species and technology and what has been achived so far?

JHC: Our global Aqua R&D center in Vinh Long is something we are very proud of. It is a state-ofthe-art facility right in the middle of the Mekong Delta, so it gives us a unique opportunity to do research in the same environment as most of our warm water species customers also do. We also have the opportunity to invite customers from Vietnam to our R&D facility to let them see how we do research to support the feed they use on their farm. The focus species are warm-water species and we do research on herbivore, omnivore and carnivore species to get detailed information about their nutritional needs. We also evaluate the digestibility of new and existing raw materials to ensure the best performance at the best cost.

AQ: What are the main challenges farmers are facing in new markets, such as Ivory Coast?

JHC: Some of the new markets have challenges in terms of the infrastructure to produce the fish or the shrimp. Sometimes the supply of juvenile fish to the farmers is limited or of varying quality. Sometimes the new markets also have to develop the customer base if fish and shrimp are not an already existing part of the food people eat. There is an eagerness to learn and develop in most of these new markets, and it is very encouraging to see local entrepreneurs facing the challenges and growing their businesses.

AQ: How does De Heus support farmer customers in the different countries?

JHC: In De Heus, we support our customers through three main pillars. Firstly, from a technical point of view, namely best cost nutrition, how our customers get the best performing feed at the best available price. Secondly, through technical support that is focused on services and solutions, e.g. selection of fry and post larvae, water management and support to develop new systems, but also by our on-the-farm approach we are looking at and analyzing all the local variables that influence the feed conversion. By considering all these variables, we are able to tailor our feed strategy fully to the individual circumstances of the local farmers. Thirdly, our science-based approach to feed with our R&D facilities is a key service to our farmers as well. We have customers that are interested in doing smaller R&D projects with us, and we can support them with trial design, analyses and basic reporting, to ensure they make decisions on a data and science-based foundation.

AQ: Finally, where would you like to see the aquaculture industry in the next ten years?

JHC: I am “aqua crazy”, so I may be biased a bit in how I think the future will look for the aquaculture industry, but I really believe that aquaculture done the right way can be a key contributor to the supply of healthy and sustainable protein demand from a growing global population. We have seen a lot of progress and still a lot of good work being done, but there are still areas that we can improve more e.g. from a feed point of view, the right focus on sustainable and novel raw materials, research on nutrition of fish and shrimp, and bio-security on farm level, and as part of this better disease prevention and management. We should be open and not afraid to discuss the challenges we have in the industry, and then together try to come up with better solutions. If we do that well, I think that in ten years from now, we will have aquaculture production that is at least double in terms of volume of what we see today, using fewer resources to produce 1 kg of fish or shrimp and products that are recognized for their health benefits and sustainable production methods.