Partner

Strategic Proposal: Dominate the Equine Feeder Market

1. The Competitive Advantage

The market leader currently dominates the rural market through volume, but their assortment is built on SlowFeeding 1.0—outdated designs that focus on storage rather than health and efficiency.

  • The Opportunity:
    By partnering with SlowFeeding 2.0, and leapfrog the competition. You aren’t just adding a product; you are making the competitor’s entire stock of models obsolete.
  • The Result:
    Our 25 years of Experience, Knowledge, and science-based R&D become your insurance policy for continued future success.

We don’t just offer a product; we offer a continuous innovation pipeline built around four unique principles with models tested and ready for mass production:

  • The Stable Series: Physiologically correct solutions for individual stalls.
  • The Paddock Box Series: High-performance netting solutions for paddock boxes.
  • The Custom Series: Custom-fit solutions for Hayhut, JFC Haybell, Tarter Hay Baskets, most traditional outdoor round bale feeders, and future hardware standards.
  • SlowGrazing: Our proprietary “reducer” technology—the first of its kind that horses actually like.
  • And of course, we can produce any traditional size and model Flat nets and Hay sacks. Traditional SlowFeeding nets also work for sheep, goats, and rabbits, but only for waste reduction.

2. SlowFeeding 1.0 became an enormous success and an international standard for how to feed horses hay.

It added a health aspect to the traditional chore of giving the horse hay, by curing EGUS and improving hygiene by elevating the eating away from dust, dirt, feces, and ammonia from the contaminated bedding, but that came with the cost of destroying the earlier natural eating angles feeding at ground level brings (4), and it also made the whole horse world waste an enormous amount of time stuffing hay nets (5).

3. Solving the $4B EGUS Problem

  • Eating is the meaning of life for horses, and their digestive system is completely set up for slow grazing most hours during both day and night.
  • It’s a long way from the mouth to the stomach, so it’s important that what they eat has been chewed thoroughly and mixed well with saliva before starting the long journey.
  • The horse’s stomach can’t expand, so the flow in and out must be like steady streams.
  • The production of stomach acid is continuous, which makes it essential that food passes through the stomach, bringing acid to the small intestine to keep the level constant in the stomach.
  • If the acid reaches the upper part of the stomach walls that have no protective glands, which it does if passing food doesn’t bring acid out of there, ulcers are burned into the stomach wall.
  • For performing horses, the situation is even worse since when they tighten the muscles around the stomach, compressing the stomach, acid reaches even the top part of the stomach, creating ulcers. The only relief they can get is when the stomach acid is mixed with well-chewed hay so that the acid is diluted and no longer as corrosive.
  • The food can stay in the stomach for as little as 15 minutes, and the small intestine is both narrow and long, so the flow of food must be even and quite slow.
  • At the end of the small intestine, there is a T-connection where both the cecum and the colon are connected. The “thunder” you can hear from the horse’s stomach is when the cecum sucks in food from the small intestine and pushes it out to the colon. This is done to add fermentation bacteria, which are stored in the cecum, to the food mixture.
  • In the colon, the food mixture ferments for up to 45 hours, and this process promotes the growth of microorganisms that create protein and vitamins. For this process to last for long enough, the feed must contain lots of coarse fibers like cellulose (that’s why your horse eats fence poles) if he doesn’t have continuous access to roughage. Horses on continuous SlowFeeding don’t eat fence poles.

Equine Gastric Ulcer Syndrome (EGUS) affects 60% of all domestic and 90% of performing horses. It is a mechanical problem, not a biological one, so why try to manipulate a working system with pharmaceutical drugs?

  • The Cause: Starvation periods, traditional feeding creates during the night leaves the stomach empty, allowing the continuous acid production to increase the level and burn the upper stomach lining.
  • The Medical Treatment: Pharmaceutical drugs are used to reduce the natural and necessary production of stomach acid.
  • The Solution: SlowFeeding ensures continuous, physiologically correct fiber flow. We treat the cause (feeding routine) so the customer doesn’t have to treat the symptom with expensive pharmaceutical drugs, affecting a natural process.
  • Studies show: Free-roaming Mustangs in the Nevada desert take lots of pauses from grazing, but never longer than 4 hours.

4. The Grazing angle

It’s a common misunderstanding that horses are only supposed to eat from the ground. The important factor is not the angle of the throat, but the angle of the head, and the horse compensates for different eating heights by changing the neck angle to let the nose, lips, and teeth have the same correct angle to the eating surface, regardless if he eats from ground level or 3+ feet up(1m). Since horses’ natural food is grass and bushes, and he eats with his teeth, he is adopted to have his teeth aligned to bite off things at any height from the ground to the top of his favorite bush. The angle of his throat is of no interest, but the angle of his nose is very important since the distance from his teeth to his stomach is so great it is important that the food has the consistency of wet porridge, not to get stuck somewhere on the way. For this, his saliva must always flow towards his front teeth, not to his throat, which means that his nose must be pointing down when he is chewing.

All the above make it very clear that the vertical surface of hanging hay nets does not give the horse natural eating circumstances.

5. SlowFeeding 2.0 and “Feeding Freedom.”

Now we have understood that hanging hay nets are not a good solution for the horse, but neither is it for the person who will have to fill them. Stuffing hay nets is a tedious waste ot time that could have been put to better use.

SlowFeeding 2.0 is designed to keep all the good parts of SlowFeeding 1.0 and correct all structural flaws, which means that it has to reduce waste and cure EGUS, but it can’t involve stuffing hay nets or forcing him to unnatural eating angles.

Traditionally, the discussion has been whether 2 feedings per day is enough or if 3 (or even 4) are necessary to be a good horse owner. Feeding-Freedom means that filling the feeder takes less than 1 minute, and it can’t be necessary to do that more than once per 24 hours. The holding capacity should be hay for 36 hours to make sure that a feeding schedule never interferes with the social schedule, and if a paid caregiver is used, feeding of many horses must be possible to do at any time of day.

  • Horse Preference: In head-to-head trials, horses prefer the SlowFeeding 2.0 interface over eating loose hay from the ground. We have the data to explain why.

From Commodity to High-Margin Health Tech

Traditional hay nets are a $10 “commodity” with razor-thin margins.

  • The Value Shift: SlowFeeding 2.0 is a Health Transformation System.
  • The Work Shift: Stuffing hay nets has been a tedious punishment for caregivers, but all SlowFeeding 2.0 models are designed for “dump-in and go” filling, which often doesn’t even need to be done every day to give the horse continuous access to his hay without overeating.
  • The Image Shift: SlowFeeding 2.0 is a status symbols that impress and signal that the owner really cares.
  • The Math: We move the consumer from a low-cost, disposable item to a premium, science-backed solution. This justifies a higher price point, increases the Average Unit Retail (AUR), and provides Lowe’s with significantly better margins.

6. Operational Excellence & “Made in USA”

We don’t just design; we create with an efficiency that shocked Beijing.

  • The Secret Manufacturing: Our Swedish and Czech operations proved that organization and trust can beat low-cost labor in industrial handicraft.
  • Factory #3 in USA: We plan to scale in the US with 100 sewing machine operators.
  • The Social Innovation: By utilizing a 2-shift, 5-hour model, we tap into an elite workforce—spouses of High-Tech engineers (“Family Managers”) who need prestige, non-technical careers. This ensures a stable, high-quality, and proud US-based supply chain.

7. Implementation & Knowledge Transfer

  • The Advantage:
    – Creating a SlowFeeding 2.0 space in the store makes the customer feel that you are a part of the future.
    – We provide the “knowledge bank” that will transform your sales personnel into consultants, capable of explaining the physiology of the horse. This puts you in a completely different category than a standard hardware store.