Balchem Corp., through its wholly owned subsidiary, Balchem Italia S.r.l., announced Aug. 29 that it has acquired Bioscreen Technologies S.r.l., a small, privately held manufacturer of encapsulated and fermented feed nutrition ingredients headquartered in Bertinoro, Italy. The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Bioscreen manufactures high-performance encapsulates and fermented products that deliver value-added solutions to an international animal nutrition and health customer base, Balchem said. Launched in 2005, Bioscreen has focused on developing and marketing new and improved technologies to meet customer needs.

Bioscreen’s existing business will be integrated within Balchem’s Animal Nutrition & Health business segment, which provides a growing portfolio of encapsulated nutrients, choline products and chelated minerals to meet the nutritional needs of ruminants, monogastrics and companion animals, the company said.

“We are very excited to bring Bioscreen’s manufacturing, technical and commercial capabilities into our company. While Bioscreen does not bring significant existing business to Balchem, this acquisition provides a European manufacturing platform for Balchem’s encapsulated nutrients and will allow us to accelerate our growth within Europe,” said Jonathan Griffin, vice president and general manager, Balchem Animal Nutrition & Health.

“The addition of local European manufacturing capabilities for our encapsulated products to our existing European choline manufacturing footprint further strengthens our ability to bring a broad range of health and nutrition solutions to our European customers,” Griffin added.

Balchem has four business segments: Human Nutrition & Health, Animal Nutrition & Health, Specialty Products and Industrial Products. The Human Nutrition & Health segment delivers customized food and beverage ingredient systems as well as key nutrients into a variety of applications across the food, supplement and pharmaceutical industries. The Animal Nutrition & Health segment manufactures and supplies products to numerous animal health markets. Through Specialty Products, Balchem provides specialty packaged chemicals for use in health care and other industries and also provides chelated minerals to the agricultural micronutrient market. The Industrial Products segment manufactures and supplies certain derivative products into industrial applications.