Growing adoption of in-ovo sexing

The adoption of in-ovo sexing is growing in countries within the EU, with expectations by some analysts that in countries that have bans on chick culling close to 100% adoption or even full adoption will be reached within a few years.

“For countries like Norway and the US, where adoption is market-driven and there are no chick cull bans, the rollout is still early, but we anticipate fast growth,” notes Robert Yaman, CEO of Innovate Animal Ag, a US-based think tank with a core mission to improve animal welfare through advancing cutting-edge technologies. “For example, after only a few months in the market, in-ovo sexing now has 5% market penetration in Norway,” says Yaman.

In the UK, there have been recent calls for the government to offer financial incentives for the introduction of in-ovo sexing technologies. In the US, Indiana-based Egg Innovations was the first to announce recently that it would adopt the technology to be implemented by mid-2025. The company sells 300 million free-range and pasture-raised eggs a year.

EU growth

Innovate Animal Ag’s recent research shows that at the end of March 2024, about 20% of the EU’s flock of 389 million commercial laying hens were produced using in-ovo sexing. That’s up from 15% at the end of September 2023, 6 months prior, a substantial increase of 22 million hens.

The company came up with these estimates mostly from self-reported production data provided privately by the in-ovo sexing tech providers. Each of them (AAT, In Ovo, Nectra, Orbem, PlantEgg and Respeggt) were asked how many in-ovo sexed hens were produced between 1 November 2022 and 31 March 2024 using their scanning systems, with 18 months being the typical lifespan of a commercial laying hen in the EU. This data was then aggregated and anonymised.

Over 90% of the estimate was generated using this self-reported data, but Yaman notes that a few companies were not able to share exact figures. “In these cases, we created an estimate based on public information like social media postings, data from the German supply chain certifier KAT and hatchery production estimates,” he says. He and his team assumed an annual mortality rate of 5% (about 6.9% for the 18-month lifespan) and a ‘hatching egg to pullet ratio’ of 2.4 to 2.8, based on a study by one in-ovo sexing technology provider.

Regarding this ratio, Yaman explains that a few of the companies did not provide numbers of hens produced through the use of the technology but only the number of hatching eggs their machines scanned. “Some of these hatching eggs are males, where the egg will be removed, and some of these hatching eggs will be infertile, which will also be removed,” he notes.

“The rest of the hatching eggs will be female. So in order to convert the number of hatching eggs the companies provided into an estimate of hens, we had to estimate of this ratio. One study from a provider of in-ovo sexing pegged their technology at 2.57 to 2.73 but, given that the ratio will vary depending on which technology is used, we used 2.4 to 2.8 to be more conservative than the study.” He adds: “So if a company told us that they processed, for example, 10 million eggs during that time period, in our estimate their number of hens would be 3.57 to 4.16 million, which is 10 million divided by the hatching egg per female ratio.”

Why use is spreading

Yaman expects market penetration will continue to rise quickly in the coming months. The technology is still relatively new and it takes time to add a process to the overall hatchery flow. At the same time, 6 new installations were just recently announced, one of them in mid-May: Orbem machines at Hendrix Bad Bentheim, Pluriton, Lohmann Dorum and Ter Heerdt hatcheries in Germany and the Netherlands, and new Respeggt circuits at A.C Weiss and Lohmann Ankum hatcheries in Germany.

One factor driving adoption is the reduction in cost due to improvements in technology and from achieving economies of scale. Since 2020, the average production cost of in-ovo sexing has decreased by over 22%, says Yaman. “We don’t know exactly what has been causing companies to lower their costs but some things that we’ve heard discussed are reducing the number of labourers needed to operate the machines and increasing the hourly throughput,” he says.

Indeed, due to the inherent economic advantages of in-ovo sexing over male rearing, Yaman reports that KAT recently announced use of in-ovo sexing had increased in the German retail egg market from 30% to 70%. With all these factors taken into account, there are now estimates that the cost of in-ovo sexing is less than 1 cent per egg on supermarket shelves.

Moving forward

Yaman acknowledges that it takes courage for business owners to be leaders in their market: “But we are confident that those who are trendsetters will achieve higher margins and brand loyalty.” Recent surveys commissioned by Innovate Animal Ag, such as one of US consumers, shows that about half of them would be willing to pay 5 cents or more extra per cull-free egg (which, as mentioned, is more than 5 times the current cost of using the tech). Another recent survey of UK consumers commissioned by In Ovo showed that those UK consumers who were willing to pay more for cull-free eggs would pay about 16 cents more per cull-free egg.

In-ovo sexing is already in place in Norway, Spain, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands. It will only expand as the cost of integrating it into hatcheries continues to fall and consumers become more aware of the concept. As Yaman notes: “When the German ban on culling first took effect, there simply weren’t enough in-ovo sexed hens to meet demand, but as supply gradually became available, in-ovo sexing quickly became dominant.”