Red Astax Granule

We have been so busy over the past months It's been hard to update the blog - so here goes.....

Red Astax Granule will not be made up by the mill now. We only have about 100kg in stock but some grades are down to a few kilo's. First come first served.
We are having new granule made up with small differences to this make up. It's basically the same with the same Astaxanthin content but vitamin A & C is less than our current Astax granule.
These will be in the form of 2 types of granule. One similar to the usual red astax granule & the other now combining our popular micro pellet combining the powerful immune stimulant Beta glucans. This is going to be especially useful to Koi & coldwater breeders but is equally something tropical breeders will find very useful.
As with any new project feed it needs to be tried out but I think they will both find favour with breeders.

We had a good source of freeze dried Tubifex but the supplier let us down & we have had to track down another clean supplier. Hopefully this can be on its way by now.

Tropical flake is massively popular. We try to get our foods made up at the last minute to make sure we offer fresh made feeds. Due to some big orders at the tail end of our stock we went out of stock fast which left us on the back foot. New flake is being made up now & will be here next week. We apologise for a small break in supply. Most customers know what we are about & bear with us in these cases but we don't like to run out of anything.

The Amazon trip is something which I have wanted to go on for some time.Alan has been over a few times to blaze the trail but this year will be my first time here. It's a bit of an indoctrination of fire as I will be collecting commercially for export orders with Steve. Looking forward to it immensely - hope I get back alive as some of the areas are very remote.
It's going to be interesting to try out some of our feeds on wild caught fish in the collection facility. We are fish breeders at heart & like to try out feeds for ourselves. We have proved our feeds on wild imports but on the banks of the Amazon is something else.

Freeze dried Blackworm is getting more & more popular. Loads going out in the UK & Scandinavia now. We said this food was going to be dynamite & those trying it are coming back for 200g packs in many cases.
Our Aussie supplier is helping us out in promotion & we were able to drop original prices by 10%. We always try to help breeders out.

We have been sourcing some products from Brine Shrimp Direct in the USA for some years. We now import many shipments from this company on a regular scale & they recently made us UK agents for their products. We didn't ask for this but we appreciate help from our suppliers who recognise how our business is expanding.
The products from this company are excellant & we started out using them in our breeding shed before we started pushing them online.

Spirulina flake - we had a fantastic batch last time. The manufacturer is finally lisening to what we want for our UK customers - big flakes, not too brittle & a load darker which means lots more Spirulina. The make up of our previous flake was good but this is way above that.
We realise many livebearers only require 8% Spirulina in their feed but nobody has put veggie cats under this criteria we are aware of. Between wood & natural Spirulina we consider this an excellant feed.

If it's not too late we hope all our breeders/customers do well this year.

NLS Disruptions

Due to the new labelling laws in the EC imports of NLS (Spectrum) feeds have been delayed. Whilst we carry a fair stock of most of the range we are suffering with the popular 600g Cichlid Formula tubs. The 300g size will be out of stock shortly. We ask our customers to try other Cichlid feeds in the NLS range such as Medium Fish formula (2mm) or the Thera range which we carry in stock including the 600g size tubs.
A new import will shortly be in the UK so this is a temporary glitch. Our apologies for this. The EC seem to want to make things as difficult as they can for businesses with constant meddling in animal feeds.
Don't forget the charity auction is getting near - 4th December 2011 in Redditch.

New Cichlid Flake

This week we had a new flake called 'Cichlid Flake'. This is made up from Krill, Mysis shrimp & Artemia etc. A flake which is very useful to any omnivorous fish. All the ingredients are made up fresh in the USA so no harmful additions are in the mix.
As you can see from the photo flakes made up in the US are generally quite thick. We specialise in these type of flakes. The range now is quite extensive & compliments the sticks & wafers we have also expanded on over the past months.

New Labelling Legislation

The EC have once again helped us out (?) with a change in how labels on pet feeds should appear.
Over the industry millions of labels are having to be dumped with basically a few word changes -
'Ingredients' should now be replaced with 'composition'
'Analysis' or 'typical analysis' should now be replaced with 'Analytical Constituents'
'Ash' should now be replaced with 'crude ash' .
WHY ? What benefits can this have for all the money we pour into the EC.
We obviously have to comply with this but they do give a window to get things sorted out.

New Foods & Update

Spirulina is something we sell a lot of particularly in flakes so we thought about mixing this with garlic flakes particularly for Rift Lake cichlids & this has been doing well. We now have new flakes from the US which are blended in the mix with these ingredients + another Spirulina flake mixed with other vegetables. I think we are probably the best online supplier now with our range of vegetable feeds.

Freeze Dried Blackworm

We now sell a lot of Australian freeze dried blackworm & have increased our order with the producer. As we buy more we can get a little knocked off the price we pay so we are passing this saving onto our customers. We have dropped the price on this product by 10% on this shipment.

Holiday Dates

I also do work in Malta's history & need to visit once a year. The site will close down from August 26th to September 5th. Last posting date August 25th. First mailing following this 6th September.
Apologies for disruption.