300 million male chicks are killed every year. Can in-ovo sexing change that?

By the end of September of 2025, NestFresh’s humanely hatched eggs will be in 90 percent of Whole Foods stores nationwide.

Employing in-ovo sexing technology in the U.S. has been a long time coming. The technology is already used in the European Union, where approximately one-third of all egg products sold come from hens hatched with in-ovo sexing.

But in the U.S. progress has been slowgoing, in part because of how many eggs Americans eat: close to 100 billion eggs per year, or about 288 per person.

“The technology that was being utilized [in Europe] just wasn’t big enough,” Urena says. “It wasn’t scalable enough to be used for the industry here in the U.S. where we consume a lot more eggs per capita than the European countries, and our farms and our hatcheries are much bigger here than they are in Europe.”

Another industry expert says the hesitation to adopt this technology in the U.S. could also be because of the highly pathogenic avian influenza, otherwise known as bird flu, that started spreading in chicken flocks throughout the country in 2023.

“Bird flu is a big problem in the poultry industry right now, and it’s one that has kind of caused the egg industry to be very cautious about anything that could impact pricing,” says Hunter Lewis, a product marketing manager for Orbem, one of the companies developing in-ovo sexing technology.

The company uses contactless, AI-integrated MRI scanning to detect the sex of chicks while they’re still in-ovo; it has less than a 2 percent error rate, according to the company. The male eggs are removed from the incubators and destroyed, while the females are hatched. There is potential to move the discarded eggs into a separate market like pet food, but as is the case with the day-old male chicks, the industry does not use these for anything within the human food supply.

Orbem is one of several in-ovo sexing technology companies that started in Europe and is expanding to the U.S., including Cheggy, which NestFresh collaborated with to produce their eggs.

While the technology has gotten cheaper as more companies enter the industry, in-ovo sexing is still more costly than conventional practices, especially during the implementation stage.

But if U.S. prices follow the same pattern as they did in Europe, it’s not a cost that should significantly affect consumer prices.

The use of in-ovo-produced eggs increased prices between 1 and 3 cents per egg, according to a study on the European rollout from the think tank Innovate Animal Ag. That’s 12 to 36 cents per dozen.

Lewis thinks getting in-ovo sexing off the ground could be easier than other major changes to the U.S. egg industry in recent years, like cage-free standards; those have become more widespread with laws like California’s Proposition 12, which banned the confinement of egg-laying hens in 2018. Adoption of those standards required broader participation across the egg industry, from hatcheries to producers.

Because there are far fewer hatcheries than egg producers in the U.S., Lewis hypothesizes that in-ovo sexing technology could be simpler to implement than cage-free because there are fewer players who would need to make the change.

“The only ones who really need to make any changes are the hatcheries, which service most of the egg producers in the country,” Lewis says. Consumer behavior could also help — if consumers are even aware of male chick culling.

A 2023 survey of more than 1,000 U.S. adults commissioned by Innovate Animal Ag found that just 11 percent of consumers know what happens to male chicks once they’re hatched. Forty-eight percent thought they were raised for meat.

But in the poultry industry, there are two types of chickens: laying hens (female) raised for their eggs and broiler chickens (female and male) raised for their meat. Broiler chickens are bred to gain weight quickly, with the fastest-growing ones slaughtered just 5 to 6 weeks after they’re born. Chickens that are bred for the egg industry grow more slowly and are much smaller, which is why the male chicks are not raised for their meat — they can’t reach the same size as broiler chickens.

Once consumers learned about male chick culling, more than half of those surveyed said they were uncomfortable with the process, and nearly three-quarters said the egg industry should find an alternative solution.