Every year, 6.5 billion chicks are culled in the poultry industry. These are male and therefore don’t lay eggs. Traditionally chicks are sorted by gender by hand and the males are culled right after hatching. This has been a problem since the 1950s. In Ovo has developed a high-throughput screening machine called Ella which can identify the gender of the egg before it hatches. In Ovo is on a mission to make this technology available around the world, to end chick culling all together.

In Ovo has developed a high-throughput screening machine, called Ella, that gender-types the egg instead of the chick. This gives hatcheries the option to only hatch the females, which is better for animal welfare and sustainability. Ella is the result of several technological breakthroughs. It can screen both white and brown eggs, at an early stage, with high accuracy and with high-throughput.

Finding a solution that screens early, both white and brown eggs, with high accuracy and at high throughput, was only possible by combining several technological breakthroughs.

We’ve identified a unique biomarker to gender-type the eggs.

The Echo® MS technology provided by Sciex determines the concentration of the biomarker within a second.

Demcon created a machine that samples at extremely high speeds.

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This project is co-funded by the European Union