Food and feed additives: Cycles

How crop prices and Chinese plants swing additive costs

What this tab covers How its prices and margins move: past booms and busts with price levels, the spread or margin that the industry watches, the drivers of the cycle and the metrics to track.

The family has two cycles. Commodity additives (starch, lecithin, lysine, methionine, vitamins) follow crop and energy prices and Chinese capacity, with visible booms and troughs. Specialty additives (enzymes, cultures, taste systems) grow steadily with processed food and livestock output, and their margins dip only briefly when input costs spike. Prices for most products are not public, so the clearest signals are input prices and the margins of listed companies. The floor is food and feed volume, which rarely falls; the ceiling is Chinese supply and customers' willingness to reformulate.

The spread to watch No public product spread; proxies are input prices and company margins

Lysine price minus about 2 x glucose cost, and methionine price minus propylene and gas costs, are the producer margins, but product prices are not public in sources reached. Ingredient firms' EBITDA margins are the public gauge.

Booms and busts

2021-2022
Vegetable oil, grain and energy prices spiked after COVID and the Ukraine war; ingredient firms raised prices and passed most costs through.
palm oil hit a record $1,777/t in March 2022; maize averaged $271/t in 2022 in 2010 dollars (World Bank via palm oil and maize tiles)
2023-2024
Feed vitamin and amino acid prices fell to troughs on Chinese oversupply, hurting producers' margins and prompting restructuring of animal nutrition businesses (indicative).
not public in sources reached; maize fell to $175/t in 2025 in 2010 dollars (World Bank via maize tile)
2024-2026
Biofuel demand pulled soybean oil higher, raising lecithin and emulsifier costs; the 2026 oil shock raised costs for petrochemical-based additives.
soybean oil $912/t (Feb 2024) to $1,781/t (May 2026); palm oil $1,180/t (Sep 2026) (World Bank via soybeans and palm oil tiles)

What drives the cycle

Crop and vegetable oil prices. Maize, soy and palm oil set costs for starches, emulsifiers and fermentation products.
Chinese capacity. New Chinese amino acid and vitamin plants cause price troughs.
Livestock disease and herd cycles. African swine fever and avian flu swing feed additive demand.
Regulation and clean label. Bans (E171, antibiotic growth promoters) and consumer pressure shift demand between products.

Metrics to track

Metric	Why it matters	Where to track it
World Bank soybean oil, palm oil and maize prices	Main feedstocks	World Bank Pink Sheet
Kerry, Novonesis, dsm-firmenich organic growth and margins	Specialty demand and pricing	company results
Feed production by species	Volume driver for feed additives	Alltech Agri-Food Outlook (indicative)
Chinese lysine and vitamin export prices	Commodity feed additive cycle	trade press (indicative)