Dutch company offers hatcheries a quick, low-cost way to stop culling male chicks

Wouter Bruins was looking for a real-world problem to solve.

For his master’s thesis in cell biology at Leiden University, he needed to come up with an idea that could potentially grow into a startup company.  Bruins looked for inspiration among the farmers of his native Randstad region of the Netherlands. One day, a farmer was showing Bruins around the henhouse when he stopped and pointed to the chickens. “For every hen you see here, we killed a rooster, a male chick,” the farmer told Bruins. “And I hate that we are doing this.”

The farmer was referring to the estimated 6.5 billion male chicks culled globally each year, usually when they are barely a day old. Egg producers, which also breed laying hens, lack a quick, low-cost way to determine the sex of an embryo before the chick hatches. When the chicks finally do emerge, farm employees verify the sex and then remove the females. The males are promptly killed, either by being dumped in a shredder or, if lucky, in a gas chamber.

“From all the problems I wrote down from all the people I interviewed, I decided to go for chick culling,” Bruins says. “It’s a topic that combines technological and business challenges, but also ethics. When you see it, you feel in your stomach that this is not okay.”

Bruins hunkered down in his apartment in Leiden to work on a solution. He founded In Ovo with a fellow student in biomedical sciences, Wil Stutterheim, and the two have been working for the last 12 years on a fast, cheap way for farmers to determine the sex of a fertilised chick egg.

The result is the Ella machine, which can determine the sex of an egg from the ninth day of incubation  by piercing the shell and extracting a tiny sample of fluid. The first machine was successfully tested in 2020, enabling 300 000 chicks to hatch without a single male being killed. Now, In Ovo is scaling up, and plans to have 10 machines running in the hatcheries of egg producers by the end of 2024.  

“If you are a biologist and you understand genetics, and you have a connection with the agricultural sector, this is one of those obvious problems that need to be solved,” says Diogo Machado Mendes, a senior economist in the European Investment Bank’s bio-economy division.  The EU bank is supporting In Ovo with a €40 million venture debt investment that is backed by an InvestEU guarantee.

Low-cost, fast tests  

Ella is a line of machines that examines fertilised eggs as they whir along on a conveyor belt. Each egg is individually photographed and positioned to ensure that a tiny sample can be taken from the ideal spot. Ella then analyses the samples to determine the sex.

Here’s how the machine checks the sex of the chicks:

  • punches a tiny hole in the egg with a needle and removes a small amount of liquid from the sac where the embryo deposits waste. The hole is then immediately closed with glue;
  • determines the sex, in about one second, by using a mass spectrometer to test the sample for a unique biomarker that In Ovo discovered;
  • sorts the eggs by sex.

The female eggs are put back in the incubator until they hatch on the 21st day. The male eggs are sent to a separate company that uses them as an ingredient in pet food.

A typical hatchery produces about 20 million chicks a year, Bruins says. In Ovo’s challenge was making the tests cheap and accurate enough for hatcheries to implement them. While the technology to determine an embryo’s sex was available a decade ago, it was too expensive to use. “I almost felt by intuition that this could be pretty big,” he says. “It was something I could spend a lot of time on, trying to solve the issue.”

In Ovo is trying to develop the technology further to be able to test eggs on the sixth day, instead of the ninth. In addition to determining an embryo’s sex, In Ovo also monitors a chick’s health during the incubation period. The funding from the European Investment Bank will enable the company to further improve the machine, rollout more machines and support additional innovations for the poultry sector.

Sorting the eggs early not only avoids the culling of baby chicks, it also helps hatcheries significantly reduce energy consumption and space, as fewer incubators are needed to hatch the same number of female chicks. Hatcheries save a significant amount of manpower, too, because most chick-sexing is done by hand. The price of testing a fertilised egg is negligible, which is important in the high-volume, low-margin business of producing eggs for consumption.

“The culling of chicks is really harsh to see,” says Céline Rottier, the loan officer at the European Investment Bank working on the project. “But the question is, can you find a solution that farmers are willing to implement? I think they might have cracked the problem.”

Pressure to end chick culling

Around the 1950s, farmers and bigger food companies started to breed two specific kinds of chickens: laying hens that were designed to make eggs, and broilers used for their meat. If the layers are born male, they obviously can’t lay eggs, but they are also no good for meat production. The result is culling. In the European Union, over 330 million male chicks are killed a year, 45 million in the Netherlands alone. 

Several European countries – such as Germany, France and Austria – have banned the practice. Others, such as Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain, are moving toward bans or have industrywide agreements in place to stop culling. The European Union is also considering legislation to outlaw the practice.

“Hatcheries know they need to come up with a solution quick,” Machado Mendes says. “Otherwise, they risk having to raise the male chicks.” Raising the chicks requires water, feed and energy, resources that don’t lead to meaningful results since the animals can’t be used for their meat.

In Ovo provides the tests as a service, working within the hatcheries to set up the machine. The company currently has three machines operating at hatcheries in the Netherlands and Belgium. The company’s goal is to prevent hundreds of millions of male chicks from being culled in the European Union and the United States in the next few years.

‘A lot is wrong’

Growing up, Bruins often played on farms and visited them with his father at weekends. He saw first-hand the conditions animals lived in. “We would sit at the table and drink coffee with the farmers,” he remembers, “and I think what I learned is that these farmers are just trying to get by.”

In Ovo is fairly vocal about the problems in the poultry industry. Improving animal welfare was a big part of what attracted Bruins and Stutterheim to the chick-culling problem in the first place. Some animal rights activists, like the Dutch Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, are supporting the company’s solution.

Chick culling remains common among egg producers, even those that sell high-margin organic products that are marketed as avoiding cruelty to animals. “It’s even more stunning when you think about sustainable brands,” says the European Investment Bank’s Rottier, “because there’s an inconsistency in the branding.”

Bruins would eventually like to expand In Ovo’s business to address other issues in the poultry industry, such as the transport of chickens, which can cause enormous stress and often results in broken bones. Part of the European Investment Bank loan is going to innovations that improve poultry welfare, in hatcheries and on farms.

“We basically work in an industry where I think a lot is wrong,” he says. “But there’s so much wrong that you can actually change things and make an impact fairly quickly.”