Introduction

More than ever safe and healthy nutrition of humans and animals has gained high importance in our daily life. In order to be able to secure our own diet, we need to assure that we feed well our food producing animals. All  materials used in animal feed need to be of good quality, need to be conform to  the actual legal requirements and in the coming years we will also need to inform more and more the consumer how these feed ingredients have been produced in a sustainable way. These issues are a big challenge, especially for such companies which have their main focus in other industrial sectors. Therefore some producers of minerals for animal nutrition decided about 15 years ago to join forces founding EMFEMA, the International Association of European Manufacturers of Major, Trace and Specific Mineral Feed Materials. In the meantime the organization has grown to a group of more than 30 companies, which have in common to manufacture minerals for animal nutrition. Together with our associated members - enterprises which use at great extend minerals for premix and mineral feed production - we have built a platform for communication and exchange of expieriences. In regular meetings we discuss new developments in science, legislation and quality standards. We are active in various working groups and projects at European level and represent there the specific perspective of our members. EMFEMA aims to give support in all questions concerning the use of their products in animal nutrition and wants to improve the awareness of the specific effects and advantages of high quality minerals in the production of feed.