Giles Shih - President and CEO of BioResource International

Giles Shih: My name is Giles Shih. I'm President and CEO of BioResource International. We're a agriculture/biotechnology company based in the RTP area, Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. We are basically helping to grow healthier and bigger chickens in a sustainable way. We have a natural feed supplement that we had developed in collaboration with NC State, North Carolina State University. What it does is it helps supplement the animal's natural digestive enzymes to get more nutritional value out of their feed. We started the company with the idea of commercializing these enzymes for poultry and for our pig animal feed applications. As long as there are people eating more chickens and pigs around the world, we see that a lot in the developing countries, in the emerging countries, we have huge opportunities overseas. We call them our big green chickens. Basically, they're healthy, sustainable poultry production because it's a natural supplement, it's not a antibiotic, it's not a hormone. This is something that's derived from nature. The product is produced by fermentation. It's like brewing beer or alcohol, but we're brewing an enzyme. These are done in very large scale fermentation tanks. The product comes to us as a spray dried concentrated product. Then we have a mixing facility and packaging facility in North Carolina where we mix and blend and package the final product. The core of our business is, really, research and development, production, and delivery. Our customers would be the Purdues and Tysons of the world, and the Smithfield's, the ones that are growing poultry and growing swine. What they do is they add the product as an additive about one pound per ton of feed, or half a kilo per metric ton in their feed mills where they're mixing corn and soybean and other rations, and then deliver it to the farms that way. We sell our product into Brazil, into India, eventually into China; huge populations that have a need for growing more poultry and swine. We are a part of that and that's really exciting, for us and for a lot of people. If you can help them grow a chicken or a pig at pennies less per pound, then they're interested. That's what you lead with, but then what we also say is there's an added benefit here because if your chicken or your pig digest the feed better, they're going to pollute less and therefore you're going to have less issues with the environment. We've done studies to show when you use our enzyme, you can lower the nitrogen that's excreted as a byproduct because the animals digest their food better. But it's not an easy sell. It takes time. People want to have healthy poultry that they know have been grown without the use of artificial products, and we think that we can be part of that long term solution. These things don't change overnight. In India and China, they have to be more resourceful and find ways to grow their chickens and pigs economically, sustainable and environmentally sustainable ways. We're not just helping to grow bigger chickens. We're feeding the world. This is an increasingly important issue as the population grows.