Feed flavours and sweeteners: palatability for feed mills

Palatability is how attractive a feed is to the animal: what makes it come closer, taste, and come back. It is defined by behaviour, not by composition: a palatable feed is one that is chosen and eaten without hesitation. Palatability in feed is therefore measured at the feeder, not in the laboratory.

A palatability enhancer, or palatant, is an ingredient added to improve that palatability. In livestock feed, feed palatability enhancers mostly belong to two families of sensory additives: flavours, the livestock feed flavoring that acts on smell, and sweeteners, which act on taste. How to use a palatability enhancer is mostly a matter of form and rate: most are powders, added in the mixer or through a premix, some are liquid; the form matters less than the profile and the rate, whether it goes into poultry feed, pig feed or cattle feed.

A feed flavour (feed flavor, or animal feed flavoring, in American usage) is built in layers: top notes that attract, heart notes that cover the smell of raw materials and minerals, and base notes, such as vanillin or lactones, that withstand heat and persist. That construction, more than the list of its ingredients, is what lets a flavour survive pelleting and last until the feeder.

A flavour is rarely bought for its scent. It is bought for what it covers: the bitterness of a mineral oxide, the sharpness of an acidifier at a high rate, the note of a cheaper meal or by-product, the smell of a fat starting to turn rancid. Each time the formula changes to hold a cost, something in the feed changes smell or taste, and the animal notices before the formulator does.

A well-chosen flavour keeps the same sensory profile on the same feed while everything behind it changes: the raw material, the phase, the season. That is the promise of Linkasty, our range of animal feed flavours.

Masking is not repairing. A fat going rancid has already lost part of its value: the flavour covers the note, an antioxidant such as Linkatiox protects the fat, upstream.

A feed sweetener is not sugar. A high-intensity sweetener is several hundred times sweeter than sucrose: it is used at a very low rate and adds no energy worth counting in the formula. That is the real difference in the feed sweetener vs sugar question. Combining two of them reproduces the fast onset and the lingering finish of sugar, and covers the bitterness of minerals and acids.

Not every species tastes sweetness the same way. Pigs are very sensitive to it, and in piglets a sweet taste carries on from milk: this is where an animal feed sweetener earns its place most. Poultry are not very sensitive to sweetness; in chickens, palatability works mostly through smell, texture and the presentation of the feed, so a sweetener in poultry feed does much less. In cattle, a sweetener for cattle feed is used mostly for young animals, at the move from milk to solid feed.

The list of sweeteners allowed in feed is not the same from one country to the next, and it changes: in Asia, each country keeps its own, and the European Union revised its own in 2026. Linkasweet combines two high-intensity sweeteners: before any offer, we check with you the sweeteners allowed in feed in your destination country.

A palatable feed always matters; it matters more at certain moments, when the animal has a reason to eat less or the feed has a reason to appeal less.

• At weaning and at the start: solid feed has to be accepted fast; it is one of the levers of piglet weaning.
• When the formula changes: a new raw material, a by-product, a different fat.
• When an additive has a taste: acidifiers or minerals at high rates.
• When it is hot: intake falls, and every mouthful counts.
• In aquaculture and pet food: aquaculture feeds and dog and cat food have their own expectations of smell and texture.