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The label is a contract, and almost nobody reads it before signing
Everything a manufacturer promises fits on the back of the bag. It is the only place he can be held to, and it is the least read text on the farm.
By Francisco Marcos Gomes FeitosaMagnata do SalFounder of VERMEFÓS. Over 30 years in animal nutrition, from the farm supply counter to the trough.
The only document in the relationship
Between the one who manufactures and the one who raises cattle there is no signed contract. There is a bag. Everything the company promises about that product is printed on the back, in small type, because the law requires it to be there: who answers for the product, the establishment's registration with the Ministry of Agriculture, the guaranteed levels, how it is to be fed and the expected intake.
Whoever writes that text knows it will be read by few and checked by fewer still. That is exactly why it works as a test of a company's character. What a company writes knowing nobody will hold it to account says more about the brand than any campaign it pays for.
The back of the bag became advertising space
Part of the trade treats the label as prime marketing territory: names that hint at performance, adjectives with no unit, an ingredient named without saying how much went in. None of that is information. Information is a number with its unit beside it, referred to a fixed quantity of product. Two products can only be compared where there is a number; where there is an adjective, no comparison is possible.
It is uncomfortable to write this from inside the industry, because selling with a handsome front is easier and cheaper than standing behind an honest back. Except the front never reaches the trough. What reaches the trough is the contents, and the contents are what is declared on the back, or ought to be.
Promising is easy; repeating is the hard part
Making one batch match the label is simple: any factory can do it. The hard one is batch forty, in a year of expensive raw material, with the buyer checking nothing and having no practical way to check. It is there, far from any inspection and from any customer watching, that the label stops being paper and becomes a decision.
If the formulation changes to fit the price, the label has to change with it, and the buyer has to be told. When one changes and the other does not, the matter is no longer formulation or production cost. It has become a question of one's word.
What I would do in the buyer's place
Read the back before paying. Photograph the label and keep the picture on your phone. Six months from now, compare it with the bag in the shed. It costs a minute, it needs no laboratory and no technician, and it is the cheapest way there is of knowing whether the company is still the same company.
A label is not packaging: it is the company's word, printed and dated. A manufacturer who does not like being read has already said, without saying it, what he thinks of the people who buy from him. And whoever writes the back expecting to be held to it writes differently: he writes less, and delivers more.
Where the figures come from
- 1Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock. Animal feed: registration of establishments and products, and labelling rules. https://www.gov.br/agricultura/pt-br/assuntos/insumos-agropecuarios/insumos-pecuarios/alimentacao-animal
Further reading
Informational content. It does not replace guidance from a responsável técnico for your herd.
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