Every day, innovation happens in many forms at Aboitiz Foods—from farm trials to streamlined processes to technological advancements. However, it’s not every day that our team members get to showcase their innovative ideas and turn them into something impactful for the organization. 

That’s where The Mill comes in.

As Aboitiz Foods’ product innovation competition, The Mill creates space for team members share ideas that can strengthen performance, address real challenges, and contribute meaningful impact. A prime example is the winning team from Indonesia—1st place winners at The Mill—which includes Rifki Putra Adimulia, Yasmin Firdaus, Krisna Yulian Irwanto, and Satria Al Yuda. Their reason for participating in the competition was straightforward: “It’s a platform where we can showcase our ideas that help improve our products and performance, ultimately benefiting the company,” said Rifki, Assistant Manager for Nutrition R&D.

Their winning project, titled “Optimization of Liver Function to Boost Broiler Performance,” explored the use of bile acid as an alternative raw material to improve fat digestion efficiency for broiler poultry. Due to the ongoing increase in raw material costs in Indonesia, the team, composed of nutritionists from various mills, needed to quickly develop solutions. 

“It challenged us,” Yasmin, Junior Nutritionist from the Bekasi mill, explained regarding their decision to join The Mill. She also admitted she had high hopes for the team’s project, saying, “During the presentation, I was just confident that we would be number one.” “We realized there are many opportunities for the Research & Technology and Development (RTD) department to share our ideas with The Mill, make it a chance to collaborate with other departments, and turn those ideas into real impact for our business,” she added. 

For the team, The Mill is beyond just a competition; it serves as a platform to allow ideas to be seen, tested, and potentially scale beyond one country.

“It was fulfilling to share our success story with our leaders. I’m grateful for the opportunity to share our innovation, and hopefully, we can also implement it in other countries as well,” cited Yuda, a Junior Nutritionist based in Medan. 

Krisna, a Junior Nutritionist from Surabaya, highlighted innovation as an Aboitiz value that guided them the most. “Innovation is important because it helps us solve problems in smarter and more efficient ways. As nutritionists in the RTD department, we encounter numerous challenges each day, and if we keep using the same methods even as our challenges change, we won’t grow. Innovation motivates us to improve, stay competitive, and allows us to grow both as teams and in the company,” he stated. 

For Yasmin, Rifki, Yuda, and Krisna, the “Always Better” mindset encourages them to continually seek improvement and to rely on data to make informed decisions. This principle is a core value that fuels Aboitiz Foods’ high-performance culture, empowering team members to think creatively and drive the organization forward.

Frequently Asked Questions

1: What is this article about?
This article profiles the Indonesian team that won first place at The Mill — Aboitiz Foods’ company-wide product innovation competition. It covers their winning project on using bile acid to improve broiler feed efficiency, why they chose to participate, what The Mill represents as a platform for scaling ideas across markets, and how their success illustrates the “Always Better” innovation culture embedded across the organization.

2: What is The Mill and why was it created?
The Mill is Aboitiz Foods’ internal product innovation competition that gives team members a structured platform to showcase ideas that can strengthen performance, solve real operational challenges, and generate meaningful business impact. It serves as a cross-functional, cross-country space for collaboration — connecting nutritionists, researchers, and specialists from different mills — and creates the possibility for locally developed solutions to be tested and scaled regionally across the company’s operations in Asia.

3: What was the winning project and what problem did it address?
The winning project was titled “Optimization of Liver Function to Boost Broiler Performance.” The four-person Indonesian team explored the use of bile acid as an alternative raw material to improve fat digestion efficiency in broiler poultry feeds. The project was developed in direct response to the sustained rise in raw material costs in Indonesia, requiring the team to rapidly develop a cost-effective, science-backed solution without compromising animal performance outcomes.

4: How does The Mill reflect the company’s broader innovation culture?
The Mill operationalizes Aboitiz Foods’ “Always Better” value by giving every team member — regardless of seniority or location — a legitimate pathway to have their ideas evaluated, validated, and potentially implemented at scale. For the winning team, it was also a vehicle for cross-department collaboration: the Research, Technology, and Development team worked alongside colleagues from multiple mills, demonstrating that innovation in a regional agribusiness is collective, not siloed.

5: What is the potential impact of the winning project beyond Indonesia?
Because the project addresses a universal challenge — cost-efficient fat digestion in broiler feeds — the bile acid solution has the potential to be implemented across the company’s feedmill operations in other Asian countries. The team expressed genuine hope that their findings would be evaluated for adoption in other markets, illustrating how a locally driven innovation born from specific cost pressures can evolve into a broadly applicable solution that benefits farmers and operations region-wide.