Extrusion cooking is one way to combine a range of food ingredients into an easy to feed pellet. While there are some other methods used to make pellets more cheaply, like the cold pressing or steam pressing method used commonly in poultry pellets (but still used in some parrot pellets). The extrusion process offers some incredible benefits over these old and tired techniques, here are a couple of interesting reasons why.

Palatability: Is a measure of how good a food tastes and how well accepted by the animal the food is. Extrusion cooking improves the palatability of bird, reptile and small animal food, just as cooking in our kitchens at home improves the taste of our foods. Extrusion cooked foods are accepted by animals much more readily than standard pellets, which reduces the chance of you throwing out costly “left over’s”.

Digestibility: One of the key reasons that Vetafarm prefers extrusion cooking to older techniques. The high pressure/temperature conditions in the extruder actually help to pull apart starches and proteins in the formula, making the food much easier and more efficient for animals to digest. This is particularly beneficial for breeding animals or babies raised on extruded diets, as much of a baby’s growth is dependent on how efficiently they can digest their food in the short time it spends in their gut.

Safety: The extrusion process has one other main benefit for foods – safety. High temperatures in the extrusion chamber effectively sterilize the Vetafarm pellets as they are manufactured. This means the risks of bacteria and other infectious organisms are effectively neutralized. It is because of this fact that Vetafarm adds Probiotics (or good bacteria) to our hand rearing formulas after they have been cooked.

featured in Talking Birds magazine May 2011