Support & FAQ
The questions buyers actually ask.
Handling, storage, pelleting, paperwork, and the regulatory position. Written for the nutritionist, the process engineer and the person who has to defend the purchase internally.
Where the answer is inconvenient for us, it is still the answer. If something here is unclear or missing, ask — the reply comes from a person within two working days.
01
Handling and storage
What arrives, how to keep it, and what shortens its life.
How does the product arrive, and in what pack size?
As a free-flowing powder, off-white to beige, in 25 kg sacks on a pallet. It handles like a standard micro-ingredient and needs no special dosing equipment.
Every delivery is accompanied by its batch Certificate of Analysis. If a pallet reaches you without one, do not use the material — tell us and we will reissue it the same day.
What are the storage conditions and shelf life?
Twenty-four months below 25 °C, in the original closed sack, kept dry and out of direct sunlight. Store off the floor and away from external walls.
Heat and moisture are what cost you viable count, and neither is recoverable. A sack left in a hot loading bay over a summer weekend is not the same product that left us, even though it looks identical.
Is an opened sack still usable?
Yes, if it is reclosed properly and used within the stated shelf life. Fold and clip the liner rather than leaving it open to the room. Once a sack has taken up moisture the powder will cake, and caked material should be rejected rather than broken up and used.
02
Pelleting and mill compatibility
The questions your process engineer will ask before your buyer does.
Will EKOSHIELD survive our pelleting line?
EKOSHIELD is built for the mill. The organisms are spore-forming, at least 80 per cent of the material is delivered in spore form, and the label figure is greater than 95 per cent survival at 90 °C for 30 minutes. No post-pellet liquid application line is required.
That figure comes from defined conditions. Your conditioner is not a laboratory, and steam quality, retention time and die friction all matter. Send us your actual conditioning temperature and retention time and we will tell you plainly whether we expect the specification to hold.
Does EKOSTART have the same thermal profile?
No, and we will not imply that it does. EKOSTART is a lactic acid bacteria consortium, not a spore-former, and we do not publish an equivalent pelleting survival figure for it. Talk to us about your process before specifying EKOSTART into a pelleted ration — for some lines it is the wrong choice, and we would rather say so early.
Is it compatible with our coccidiostat, acid or enzyme programme?
We do not publish a blanket compatibility claim, because a blanket claim across every commercial coccidiostat, organic acid and enzyme on the market would not be one we could defend.
Send us your premix specification and we will tell you what we know, what is extrapolated from the literature, and where the honest answer is that nobody has tested that particular combination.
What is the inclusion rate?
Inclusion rates are issued with the technical dossier rather than published here, because the right figure depends on species, stage and the ration it is going into. Ask for the dossier and you will have it, along with the strain designations, before any commercial discussion.
03
Documentation
What we will send you, and how quickly.
How do I get a Certificate of Analysis?
A CoA is issued with every batch and travels with the delivery. If you need the current CoA before ordering — for a specification file, a customer audit or a due-diligence pack — ask and we will send it. There is no gate and no form to fill in beyond telling us who you are.
How do I request the technical dossier?
Email info@ekome.co.uk, or use the enquiry form, and say which product and which production stage you are working on. We respond within two working days.
The dossier contains the strain designations, the declared viable count and its method, inclusion guidance, stability data, and the reference list behind every mode of action we describe. It also contains the gaps: the organisms in our consortium for which we do not consider the species-level evidence clean, and the fact that no published study yet tests the full blend.
Do you have trial data from commercial flocks?
No. Ekome is pre-launch and has run no commercial trials. Any performance figure you see on this site is published, peer-reviewed work by independent groups using their own strains, and it is attributed to them wherever it appears. We will not present it as ours, and you should be sceptical of a supplier who does.
04
Evaluation, trials and supply
What we can put in your hands today, and what we cannot.
Can we get product to evaluate?
Not yet. Ekome is pre-launch and is not despatching product, so we are not going to tell you otherwise in order to keep a conversation going.
What we can give you now is the technical dossier, the current Certificate of Analysis, and the systematic review with the published papers behind it — including the places where we think the evidence is thin. We will also go through your mill conditions with you and help design a trial worth running. If evaluation material is what you need, tell us, and we will be straight with you about where we are.
Will you help us design an on-farm trial?
Yes, and we would rather you ran one than took our word for anything. We will work with your nutritionist on house allocation, control arrangement, the measures that matter and the run length needed for a difference to be readable.
We also ask that you agree with us in advance what would count as no effect. A trial that can only produce good news is a marketing exercise.
We are a distributor. How do territory conversations work?
Send a commercial and distribution enquiry describing your territory, the customers you serve and the technical support you can provide locally. Our markets are Ghana and the United Kingdom. We would rather have one distributor who can answer a nutritionist’s question than five who can only move pallets.
Where are the products manufactured?
In the United Kingdom. Manufacturing site details and quality documentation are provided with the technical dossier under the usual confidentiality arrangements.
05
Regulatory position
The honest answer, including the parts that are not finished.
What kind of product is this, legally?
A zootechnical feed additive in the functional group gut flora stabilisers, under Regulation (EC) No 1831/2003. It is not a veterinary medicinal product.
That classification governs what we may tell you. We may say the product is intended to stabilise gut flora, support zootechnical performance and feed conversion, support nutrient absorption and promote a healthy microbiome. We may not say it treats or prevents disease, reduces mortality, or replaces antibiotics for a therapeutic purpose — and we do not.
Are your products authorised or registered?
No. Nothing in our range currently holds an authorisation, and we will not let a page on a website suggest otherwise.
Authorisation under Reg. (EC) No 1831/2003 is granted for a specific strain, held by a specific holder, for specific species and conditions of use. It does not transfer with an organism, and the existence of an authorisation for a species elsewhere in the register says nothing about our product. Ekome does not hold such an authorisation.
If your specification requires an authorisation number today, we are not yet the right supplier, and we would rather you learned that from us in the first email than from a compliance review six weeks in.
What certifications do you hold?
None that we can display. We do not publish certification badges, and any that appeared on an earlier version of this website were shown in error and have been removed. When we hold a certification, we will name the scheme, the certificate number and the issuing body so that you can verify it independently — which is the only form in which a badge means anything.
Can we use this to reduce antibiotic use on our units?
Reducing reliance on antibiotics is a legitimate reason to be interested in gut flora stabilisers, and it is one of the most common reasons customers approach us. But we make no claim that our products replace an antibiotic, and no such claim is permitted for this product class. Any change to a veterinary treatment programme is a decision for your veterinary surgeon, on your birds, and not something a feed additive supplier should be advising on.
Still stuck
Send us the awkward one.
The questions we most want are the ones this page has not answered — a conditioning temperature that worries you, a premix interaction nobody has tested, a claim from another supplier you would like checked. We answer within two working days, and we will tell you when we do not know.