Nuscience & Zoersel
The second day of our trip started at 8 o'clock with a nice
breakfast at the hostel. We said goodbye to the hostelmanager and already
looked forward to our return to Hostel 47 on Friday. We left Gent and traveled
to Nutrition Sciences, the R&D division of the Nuscience Group, in Drongen.
At Nuscience we were welcomed by Geert Bruggemans and
Katrien de Schepper. They both gave a presentation about the company and the
differences between a career in academics or at a company. Here we learned that
Nuschience is a leading partner for companies in the animal feed industry all
over the world. Nuscience has 650 employees and supplies products, like
premixes, to over 60 countries and has a revenue of 340 mil. per year.
Then it was up to Eva and Anouk to present their case about
drying methods of animal feed components. They came up with a novel combination
of techniques and even had some results from a pilot test to show Nuscience.
This method is really promising and further research will for sure be done. Nuscience
was really interested and enthousiastic about their presentation and findings.
Before we went on a tour around the company we had
delicious mini-sandwich lunch. We were taken on a tour around the factory and
the laboratory. In the factory every bag of product is checked to keep the
quality as high as possible. In the laboratory they have all the equiptment for
quality control/assesment and they work in a very efficient way and process
over 80.000 samples a year with 3 researchers. We could even taste the special
additives that go in piglet feed. This actually tasted unexpectedly sweet.
We all got some goodies from Nuscience, including a cap...
This resulted in some really nice group pictures as you can see.
We continued our trip to Zoersel which is a small village
(in the middle of nowhere) near Westmalle. Gagelhof was a really cozy youth
hostel in the woods run by a group of volunteers. Our hosts were an older
married couple. Here we played a game of volleybal (we invented some new rules
to help compensate for our lack of motorskills). We then watched the Belgiums
win from Australia in the world cup and enjoyed a nice home cooked meal made by
Annie. She really pampered us with cooking pears from their own orchard,
homemade appelsauce and a cornetto for dessert. We spend our evening playing
'halli galli' and 'cards agains humanity' around the fireplace with some local
beers. We also got to taste beer made with gagel instead of hops.
