Effect of Non-Dairy Creamer Supplementation to Corn-Soybean Meal Based Diet on Growth Performance, Nutrient Digestibility and Meat Quality in Broilers

There is increasing interest to replace animal fats by vegetable fat sources in broiler chickens. Animal fats are rich in long-chain saturated fatty acids and most of vegetable fats have higher content of unsaturated fats acids. Non-Dairy Creamer (NDC) contain hydrogenated vegetable-based fats, which increased oxidative stability, longer shelf life and cheaper than animal fats. Consequently, the objective of the current study was to evaluate the effect of two different levels of NDC added to diets on growth performance, nutrient digestibility and carcass quality in broiler diet. A total of 576 seven-day-old male Ross 308 broilers with an average initial BW of 180 ± 1g were used in a 4 wk feeding experiment including a starter phase (7 to 21d) and a grower phase (22 to 35d). Birds were randomly allocated into 1 of 3 treatments with 12 replicates per treatment and 16 birds per pen. Treatments consisted of T1, Control; T2, T1 + 0.1% Creamer; T3, T1 + 0.5% Creamer. All diets were formulated to meet or exceed the NRC (1994) requirements for broiler chickens. The analyzed composition of the Creamer consisted of moisture 5.21%, crude protein 3.02%, crude fat 5.86%, crude fiber 2.42%, and crude ash 3.27%. From d 28 to 35, chromic oxide (0.2%) as an indigestible marker was added to diets for determination of nutrient digestibility of dry matter (DM), Calcium (Ca), phosphorus (P), and nitrogen (N). All data were statistically analyzed using the GLM procedure of the SAS program (SAS Inst. Inc., Cary, NC, USA). Differences among treatments were separated by Tukey’s range test. The broilers were weighed by pen and feed intake (FI) and the number of living broiler chickens were recorded on d 7, 21, and 35. This information was then used to calculate body weight gain (BWG), feed conversion ratio (FCR). With regards to meat quality, no adverse effects were observed among the treatments. However, a higher score (P < 0.05) in redness was observed in T3 (10.68) than T1 (9.63). In addition, the relative weight of breast muscle was reduced (p < 0.05) in T3 (13.97) compared with T1 (15.74). There were no significant differences on BWG, FCR and nutrient digestibility among the treatments in both starter and grower phases. There were no negative effects on growth performance, meat quality, and nutrient digestibility were observed. In conclusion, non-dairy creamer could be a kind of fat sources additive in broiler diets, but further studies are needed to test the optimum levels of NDC to be supplemented in the diets of broilers.