The egg industry hides a dark secret.
Every year in the United States, more than 300 million male chicks are hatched. But because they don’t lay eggs or produce valued meat, they are typically killed within a day, usually shredded alive in industrial grinders. The practice, known as chick culling, is replicated on a huge scale around the globe, with an estimated 6.5 billion male chicks killed each year, or around 200 each second.
But now an American egg producer said he plans to begin selling eggs from chickens bought from a hatchery equipped with new technology that avoids that grisly outcome, a first in the United States.
“The average consumer simply has no awareness that this is even an issue,” said the producer, John Brunnquell, founder and president of Indiana-based Egg Innovations, which sells 300 million free-range and pasture-raised eggs a year.
Mr. Brunnquell said the main hatchery he uses was on track to adopt the technology in early 2025 and that he expected to begin selling eggs produced with the new technique late next summer. “The assumption is, once we start, some other people will follow,” he said. “Someone has to move the needle.”
He declined to identify the hatchery, citing a nondisclosure agreement.
Several European countries use the technology, known as in-ovo sexing, which can determine the sex of a chick before it hatches. Then unwanted eggs can be destroyed before the point at which, according to studies, the embryo feels pain. The technology would add a few cents per egg, industry experts say.
Germany and France both ban chick culling, and Italy plans to end the practice in 2027. Eggs from hens that were raised in hatcheries that use the technology are sold in Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain and a number carry a “free of chick culling” label.
The United States has lagged despite a nonbinding pledge made by the United Egg Producers, a trade group, to end chick culling by 2020. The group, which represents the producers of more than 90 percent of eggs sold in the country, has said that in-ovo technology isn’t yet available on the scale necessary for the American egg industry.
In a statement, the group said that smaller European hatcheries were better positioned to adopt in-ovo sexing and that American producers want to use it. “This is a priority and is the right thing to do,” the group said. But Robert Yaman, founder and chief executive of Innovate Animal Ag, a nonprofit focused on technology that improves animal welfare, said the scale of the egg industry in Europe was similar to that of the U.S.
By and large, Americans are unaware of the practice of chick culling, which has meant little consumer demand in the United States to end its use.
“I think you don’t have to be a philosopher to believe that it’s morally problematic to let some animals be born just to be immediately killed,” Mr. Yaman said.
About 87 percent of eggs laid in the United States are unfertilized table eggs, according to the Department of Agriculture; the United Egg Producers said 92.6 billion table eggs were produced in 2022. The remaining 13 percent are fertilized eggs, also known as hatching eggs. The female chicks are raised to produce chickens.
Male chicks serve little purpose in this production cycle, because they can’t lay eggs and their flesh is deemed tough and stringy. In commercial hatcheries, workers determine the sex of day-old chicks and male chicks are killed and often turned into animal feed.
Animal rights groups, not surprisingly, rail against the practice. Vicky Bond, president of the nonprofit Humane League, called it “a symptom of a broken system that sees sentient beings as trash that can be created and destroyed without any consideration for their suffering.”
Two types of in-ovo sexing technology are currently being used in Europe, with more in development. One method involves noninvasive imaging of incubating eggs to determine the embryos’ sex, and another involves making a tiny hole in the eggshell to sample and analyze the fluid inside, and resealing the hole, often with beeswax.
According to Innovate Animal Ag, almost 15 percent of laying hens in the European Union were hatched using in-ovo sexing as of September 2023. (Culling bans don’t apply to female ducklings killed as part of the foie gras industry).
The Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research, a nonprofit group established and partially funded by Congress, said widespread adoption of in-ovo sexing could significantly reduce costs and inefficiencies because roughly half of fertilized eggs would no longer need to be incubated until they hatch. Late last year, the group announced three finalists in a multimillion dollar prize to develop in-ovo sexing technology that is highly accurate and can be used at a commercial scale.
Mr. Brunnquell of Egg Innovations said he did not yet know how many eggs hatched from no-cull flocks he would sell, or what their price might be.
“Is there enough innate concern about male chicks being euthanized that people will pay a bit extra?” he asked. “That’s the unknown.”
