Эксперты Fastmarkets объяснили, как биоэнергетика и торговые политики формируют волатильность цен на кормовые сырьевые материалы

ContactExisting Customer SupportLogin Procurement teams across food and beverage, and pet food and animal feed, are working through one of the more unpredictable stretches in recent memory. Feedstock costs are shifting under trade policy and biofuel mandates, packaging inputs carry their own separate pressures, and sustainability commitments increasingly come with a real price tag rather than staying a talking point. That’s the backdrop for Fastmarkets’ new roundtable series, five conversations bringing together the analysts who track these markets every day, in genuine discussion rather than scripted commentary. Across the five episodes, the series works through cost volatility, packaging economics, supply chain transparency, and the tension between sustainability and cost, each one aimed at giving procurement teams in these sectors a clearer, more current read on where things are heading and why. Episode one opens with the question sitting behind almost everything else in this series: why do feedstock costs move the way they do, and why does that movement feel increasingly hard to predict? Ryan Standard, Editorial Director for Agriculture & Biofuels, takes this one on directly. His starting point isn’t the price of corn or the price of fat in isolation, it’s a reframe of how procurement teams should actually be thinking about cost in the first place: What can I pay? What do I have to pay? And what do the sellers want me to pay? Ryan Standard, Managing Editor, Agriculture & Biofuels Three short questions, but they capture something real: procurement cost isn’t just a historical data point, it’s a moving target shaped by forces well outside the ingredient itself. Chief among those forces, mandates. Ryan walks through how biofuel policy across the US, Brazil, Indonesia, and Europe filters directly into the price of feedstocks like soybean oil, animal fats, and used cooking oil, not as a background factor, but as a primary driver of what procurement teams actually pay. It’s why, as he puts it, understanding “the historic” price relationship between something like corn and fat “is not enough” anymore. Mandate structures, credit prices, and how they evolve over the next few years matter just as much as the historical price itself. The episode also gets into the mechanics some procurement teams may not have fully priced in, the relationship between soybean oil and soybean meal, what Ryan calls “the crush.” More crushing activity for oil, in theory, produces more meal as a byproduct, which can ease the overall cost of feed ingredients elsewhere in the supply chain. It’s a reminder that these ingredient markets don’t move in isolation, a shift in one corner of the soybean complex can ripple into cost decisions for a completely different part of the business. None of this is abstract for the audience this series is built for. Whether you’re sourcing lipids for pet food formulation, managing feed ingredient costs against a shifting mandate landscape, or just trying to build a forecast that holds up longer than a quarter, episode one lays out the actual mechanics behind the volatility everyone in this space has been feeling. This is only the beginning of the conversation. Episodes two through five turn to packaging cost pressures across aluminium and paper, the growing transparency gap in multi-tier supply chains, and the increasingly real cost of sustainability commitments, each one featuring the same panel of Fastmarkets analysts working through what’s actually driving their markets. Watch episode one now: Continue to watch the series as it unfolds over the coming weeks.