Egg-Tech Prize Finalists Announced, Bringing In-Ovo Sexing One Step Closer to Mass Market
This week, the Foundation for Food and Agriculture (FFAR) announced three finalists for the Egg-Tech Prize, a research competition to develop in-ovo sexing technology suitable for the mass market. A prize of roughly $500,000 was awarded to each of the three finalists.
The Egg-Tech Prize was established in October 2018, a few months before the first eggs from in-ovo sexed hens went on sale in Germany. The target criteria for the prize were set in collaboration from top stakeholders in the US egg supply chain including USPOULTRY and The United Egg Producers. The evaluation criteria, which included 98% accuracy, 15,000 eggs per hour, a hatching rate >1.5% from baseline, and working before day 8 of incubation, were set to be purposely strict, to ensure that the winner’s technology could be used throughout the entire US supply chain.
It’s likely that the first in-ovo sexing solutions in the US will start in the specialty part of the market (e.g. pasture-raised, free-range, organic), while there is still a price premium for no-kill eggs. For this part of the market, current solutions are more than ready to be deployed. However, in order for in-ovo sexing to become the industry standard for the mass market, it needs to be cost competitive with current manual sexing methods. The three finalists for the Egg-Tech Prize have demonstrated substantial progress towards this goal.
The three finalists were:
Leonard van Bommel from In Ovo, one of the five in-ovo sexing companies currently in the market in Europe. In Ovo's technology is based on analyzing the allantoic fluid inside the egg. Earlier this year, In Ovo announced a $42M loan from the European Investment Bank to further scale and develop their technology. This further funding will allow them to progress even further towards these goals.
Dr. Carla van der Pol from HatchTech Group, a hatchery equipment manufacturer that owns respeggt group and PLANTegg, two of the other in-ovo sexing companies with commercialized technology in Europe. Respeggt group and PLANTegg also analyze the allantoic fluid inside the egg, historically using different types of biological analyses. Their Egg-Tech Prize reward is for a slightly different method, using hyperspectral imaging to analyze the fluid sample from the egg. This has the potential to be faster and cheaper than their current technology, which is already widely available in Europe.
Thomas Turpen from SensIT Ventures, the only finalist who also received funding during Phase I of the Egg-Tech Prize, and the only American company among the finalists. SensIT Ventures’s technology is based on analyzing volatile compounds which escape through the egg shell. Unlike the other two finalists, SensIT Ventures does not yet have technology which is commercially available, but this additional funding should allow the company to move into commercial trials.
Robert Yaman, Executive Director of Innovate Animal Ag, said, “In the long term, it’s clear that in-ovo sexing has the potential to be cost competitive with paying humans to manually sex chicks. After all, this is fundamentally an automation technology. Programs like the Egg-Tech Prize are critical to make this happen faster, so we can finally end the unpopular and wasteful practice of male chick culling. I’m very excited to see what further progress these companies can make with this funding.”