We will maintain our vigilance on feed safety – and – new challenges have emerged. Our Community has asked us to play our part in the biggest challenge facing our industry today; sustainability. In doing so, we want to be open, explicit, and transparent so everyone knows what to expect from us.
I’m proud to say that we plan to elevate feed sustainability to the same level as feed safety in our work – building on our experience and enhancing the standards, resources, and support available through our Feed Responsibility Assurance (GMP+ FRA) offerings. Our ambition is to stay relevant to our GMP+ Community, continuously improve, and demonstrate leadership.
When we embarked on this journey, our team worked with stakeholders and experts to develop the guiding principles our organisation will use in this new chapter. These redesigned values, mission, and vision will shape our efforts to ensure safe and sustainable feed, worldwide.
Our vision
“Feed should be safe for animals, people, and our planet.”
This is our destination, and you can already see that we are lifting our sights beyond safety alone and incorporating sustainability into our goal. Unfortunately, the feed sector has a large footprint – that means we have the opportunity to do something about it.
Our mission
“We enable every company in the feed chain to take responsibility for safe and sustainable feed.”
This is the unique role that we can play, our contribution to the challenge. How we will do this is also important; our primary tool is the use of standards, and our globally accepted scheme is developed with the industry, and based on solid legal, scientific, and practical foundations.
Our proposition is that our scheme and additional services enable companies to commit to safe and sustainable feed, securing business continuity. We focus on practicality, sharing information and developing services to enable companies to play their part.
Our values
A vision and mission tell you where you’re going and how you’ll get there, but values inform the behaviours and actions on the way. They are the guardrails for our work.
Leading: For me and GMP+, leadership is not about being instructive or directive, or waiting for change to happen, but instead about taking the lead, initiating change, and involving people. It means learning from others, experimenting, inspiring, and challenging our community. It might mean we get things wrong, but we will learn from what we do.
Together: We want to know and hear our community. We involve our stakeholders through the work of our committees, taskforces, and consultations, and we are actively discussing topics with the community in a more structured and inclusive way. I truly want to know what concerns our industry, so we stay informed about what’s happening.
Practical: We make changes step by step, involving people in the process, and determining what works in the real world. But for me, instead of thinking and discussing forever, being practical also means learning by doing. For our work, I will always ask myself ‘will this work in practice?’ – that is what will ultimately determine success.
Valuable: We think of how we can add value for our companies, Certification Bodies, and wider community. We focus on where our work can make the most difference to our community in the pursuit of safe and sustainable feed. It also means continuously improving, and staying up to date with the latest industry developments.
A logical next step
In many ways these new guiding principles are not radical, or a huge departure from our existing work. But they are essential, and open for all to see. Based on our strengths they are the natural evolution of our work as we seek to support an industry facing new challenges.
We will maintain our vigilance on feed safety while we enhance our work on sustainability further. We will connect with stakeholders from across the industry, and help the community to take proactive steps. Our global community of forward-thinking and ambitious companies have already shown that they take their responsibilities seriously. They inspire us to go further, reach higher, and take the next step.
Together, we can make safe and sustainable feed, worldwide, a reality.