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Tucker Milling celebrates its twentieth anniversary this year. The company, based in Alabama in the U.S., produces feed for a wide range of animals, from horses and poultry to pigs and goats. Tucker Milling supplies more than 300 independent outlets in the Southeastern United States and has doubled its production volume over the past eight years.
The family business is headed by brothers Brian and Scott Tucker. As a nutritionist, Curran Gehring is responsible for the composition of Tucker Milling’s products. “We owe our strong expansion to a large extent to a shift in focus. Over the years, we placed more emphasis on premium products with particularly favorable properties, such as high egg production or the athletic performance of horses. And having our own transport fleet has ensured that we’ve been able to further improve our service level.”
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To arrive at these premium products, Tucker Milling’s recipes often have a certain degree of complexity. “It’s not uncommon for us to mix different sub-recipes into one product,” says Gehring. “Most formulation software tools add a partial recipe as a single ingredient in the next formulation step. If you then want to analyze or rework a final recipe from the ground up, you have to analyze those basic steps yourself via spreadsheets. But BESTMIX® Recipe Management makes it possible to fully integrate the partial recipe into all further formulation phases and to visualize and analyze the contribution of each sub-ingredient within the end product. That creates undeniable added value.”
Tucker Milling has been using BESTMIX® Recipe Management for a year now. “In the seven years that I’ve worked here, we always used the same software from a different supplier. That package no longer appealed to me for various reasons. I met the BESTMIX® Software team at trade shows and found that it best matched our complexity and innovative outlook. I found the automatic updates of the software to be an important benefit. Without having to worry about it yourself, you always have a version that’s completely up to date.”
Declaration to FDA
Gehring says that Tucker Milling mainly uses BESTMIX® formulation software for creating new recipes. “We offer a stable composition for most of our products. Since we print the ingredient list and nutritional value on our packaging, we’re committing ourselves to it. BESTMIX® Software is helping us to further expand our portfolio, but it also ensures that we always produce within the predetermined tolerances.”
BESTMIX® Recipe Management helps Tucker Milling meet legal feed declaration requirements. “The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires feed manufacturers to maintain a Master Record File consisting of each version of a recipe, the label information, and mixing instructions. In the past, that required time to put the file together with each recipe change. Thanks to BESTMIX®, we can now easily call up all recipe versions. In that context, we’re very much looking forward to the label functionality, which will enable us to automatically create and maintain the Master Record File within the BESTMIX® software. Applications like this are very important to an American company.”
Personalization
The experienced nutritionist also loves the personalization options within BESTMIX® Recipe Management. “We analyze our formulation costs per ton but sell in 50 lbs. bags. The software makes that calculation and conversion automatically, so that we can immediately see impact on price.”
Gehring describes using BESTMIX® Recipe Management as a learning curve. “The software really has a lot to offer. Because we’ve only introduced the package quite recently, we haven’t explored all the possibilities yet. I advise users to initially focus on the really critical benefits and then explore the software further as they become more familiar with it. But I can say that its implementation has already proven its usefulness to our business!”