Drongen, Belgium – Nuscience Group, a member of the Royal Agrifirm Group, is launching Q-prove®, a brand new product to cope with the wooden breast syndrome in broiler chickens. Although it’s not a threat to human health, wooden breast results in significant financial losses for poultry farmers, integrators and slaughterhouses. With Q-prove®, Nuscience is now able to deal with this problem and reduce the percentage of affected birds substantially. It is the first and unique solution for wooden breast syndrome in the animal feed industry.

Wooden breast syndrome is a serious problem for poultry husbandry. It can affect broiler chickens, making the meat hard and chewy and rendering the animals unmarketable. The main cause of wooden breast is the high growth rate and high breast meat yield. Due to the fast muscle growth and the enlarged muscle cells, the space between muscle fibers is reduced. This restricts the blood supply to the muscles, which can no longer reach the desired oxygen levels. The resulting dead muscle cells, harden the meat, causing the wooden breast.

After conducting major field trials in Europe and South-America, Nuscience became the first to develop an effective solution for this problem: Q-prove®. The product can lower the incidence of wooden breast by reducing oxidative stress and supplying more oxygen to the cells. With Qprove®, the muscle cells are able to grow very fast without any meat loss.

The first signs of muscle degradation can be found at an early life stage. Therefore it’s important to start using a high dosage of Q-prove® in the starter feed and gradually reducing the dosage as the animals grow. Trials have shown that at a higher age (around 42 days) the incidence of severe wooden breast can go up to 20%. In that case, adding Q-prove® can reduce this number to about 2.5 %. This is a huge financial improvement for both the farmer as for the slaughterhouse.

Helping the poultry farmers who are facing a lot of problems with wooden breast, will be the first priority for Nuscience. Especially helping the markets with high growth rates and high slaughter ages, such as the US, Brazil and Europe. Q-prove® will be manufactured in the new Nuscience factory in Drongen and will be exported worldwide from this location.

For more information please contact our Product Manager Poultry, Manu De Laet at [email protected].