Pelleted vs. Textured Horse Feed

By Clair Thunes

Q: What is the difference between textured and pelleted feed, and is one better than the other?

A: The terms “textured” and “pelleted” refer to the form in which the feed comes. Pelleted feed is, as the name suggests, feed that comes in the form of a pellet, whereas in a textured feed the majority of ingredients are in a loose form. However, many textured feeds include pellets, which often contain the added vitamins and minerals in the diet.

Textured Feeds: Simple Ingredients, Simple Technology

Textured feeds were the original commercial feed mixes because they traditionally required little in the way of technology to mix together readily available grains and other ingredients, such as molasses. They were often referred to as “sweet feed” due to the molasses, and many still refer to textured feeds as sweet feed, even though today’s versions often contain significantly less molasses than in the past. In fact, some of today’s so-called “sweet feeds” are safe to feed to horses with metabolic disorders.

How Feed Pellets are Made

As feed technology expanded, manufacturers developed the ability to create pellets. Pellets have some distinct advantages over textured feeds. For example horses can’t sort out one feed ingredient from another. Some people were initially skeptical about pellets. A lot of pellets look alike and it is hard to tell exactly what has gone in to a pellet as the ingredients are ground. Pellets also allow for the use of grain by-products such as wheat middlings and dried distillers grains. As a result, rumors exist that pellets contain low-grade ingredients that have been swept off the mill floor, but this isn’t accurate.

To make pellets, any feed ingredients—such as grains, hay, or beet pulp—must first be ground or chopped into very small particles. Any vitamins or minerals are then added to this mix and liquid ingredients such as molasses or fat might also be added at this time. It is very hard to make a pellet that contains a lot of fat, because the pellets won’t stick together. With the increased demand for pellets with higher fat contents, it has become increasingly common to spray fat and or any molasses on to the exterior of the pellet after it’s made. The amount is still somewhat limited though, and pellets rarely contain more than 8% crude fat.

Once all ingredients going in to the pellet are combined, the mixture moves to a conditioning chamber where steam is introduced to increase the heat and moisture content. From here the hot moist mix is forced through a die within a pelleting mill. The die has hundreds of holes in it and the food mixture passes through the holes and is cut off at a predetermined length to make the pellets. The size of the hole in the die dictates the diameter of the pellet.

Pellets at this point are fairly soft and must be cooled in order to harden. Moisture must also be removed, otherwise the pellets would mold during storage. Once at the desired temperature and moisture content, the pellets are bagged for sale.

While pelleted and textured feeds’ forms are quite different, they often use very similar feed ingredients and therefore nutritionally can be quite similar. Should you want a high-fat feed with more than 8%crude fat this will likely be in either a textured feed or in the form of an extruded nugget, which looks like a pellet but has been processed differently.

Should You Choose “Unprocessed” Feeds?

Some people are concerned with the amount of processing that pellets have gone through during manufacture, because in human nutrition the industry is moving away from processed food. However, the grinding and steam used to make pellets actually improve ingredient digestibility due to increasing the ingredients’ surface area, as well as making some sources of starch more digestible. It’s true that heat might negatively impacted certain feed ingredients while making the pellets, and this is particularly true of heat-sensitive vitamins. But, their response to temperatures used during manufacture has been studied and the amounts included in feeds is increased to make up for any expected losses.