What is in-ovo sexing to prevent male chick culling in egg farming?   

Each year, the U.S. egg industry kills over 350 million male chicks on the day of hatch. Why? Because they don’t lay eggs and they do not put on weight as fast as broiler meat chickens. We explain why Kipster uses in-ovo sexing technology to stop male chick culling on the day of hatch, what it is, and why we see this as an interim step towards more humanely egg production at the U.S. Kipster farm.  

Kipster’s ultimate goal is to raise these male chicks for meat. We were the first commercial egg farmers in the U.S. to raise flocks of roosters for meat when the Kipster farm started in North Manchester, IN, in 2022. But we had to pause it. We have not been successful in bringing their meat to market due to a lack of suitable infrastructure in the U.S. Unfortunately, for the first time in Kipster’s history, we had to let the hatchery cull the one-day old male chicks. That is why we reverted to in-ovo sexing technology as soon as it became available in the U.S. We’ve put an end to the culling of one-day old male chicks again. But why does this still leave us uneasy?

Why the egg industry doesn’t want male layer chicken

It used to be common practice for people to keep chickens for their eggs and to eat the meat from the hens once their laying cycle ended. They would also eat the roosters. But nowadays, people mainly eat meat chickens produced by the broiler industry. Roosters from egg layer chickens are not bred for meat. They don’t gain weight as much and fast as broiler chickens nowadays. And obviously they don’t lay eggs. That’s why they are deemed worthless and that is why the industry started culling them when broiler meat became too competitive.   

Where do laying hens and roosters come from?

The fate of male and female chicks at hatcheries depends on which industry they hatch into.

In the egg industry, laying hen chicks come from parent flocks that lay fertilized eggs. These hatching eggs go from parent farms to incubators at specialized hatcheries. After 21 days in the egg, they hatch. As per natural law, fifty percent are male, and fifty percent are female. And per business as usual, the egg laying hens raised in the egg industry are typically separated from the males on the day of hatch. The male chicks are culled and diverted to be used in pet food or livestock feed.

The hatchery vaccinates the females and trims the tips of their beaks to prevent them from pecking and wounding each other out of stress or boredom at the farm. The female chicks arrive by truck at the pullet farm the next day. Here, they live for about 17 weeks after which they move to the egg farm. They quickly grow into young hens that start laying eggs for human consumption around 21 weeks of age.

Kipster does not have their beaks trimmed because we do not want to unnecessarily mutilate them. We provide enrichments like perches, climbing structures, and dustbathing spaces. We scatter haybales, peck blocks, and feed pellets throughout the gardens so the birds have something to peck at instead.

Where to broiler meat chickens come from?

The broiler meat chickens also come from hatcheries which incubate fertilized eggs that come from parent farms. These parents are genetically bred to produce meat chickens that gain weight as fast as possible, as opposed to laying as many eggs as possible. Here also half of them are males and half are females. The difference here is that both roosters and hens are going to broiler meat production farms as soon as they hatch, where they live for up to 6-7 weeks. Then they go to a slaughter facility for processing. 

What is in-ovo sexing?

In-ovo sexing is a technology newly available in the U.S. that can detect the sex of the chick in the hatching egg as early as day 8 of incubation. The in-ovo sexing machine removes the eggs with the males inside from the incubation process. The male chicks will not hatch.

The Kipster hens come from the Hendrix Genetics hatchery which uses the Seleggt in-ovo sexing technology. It’s the first technology in the U.S. that works for both white and brown egg-laying breeds, and the first to use DNA analysis to determine the sex of the embryo.

Are Kipster eggs free of male chick culling?

The in-ovo sexing machine has an error rate of less than 0.5%. The technology did not detect a small number of male chicks – just over 100 – that hatched anyway when we first used the technology in June 2025. We brought these cockerels to Farmer Brad, who raised them for meat and sold them to local customers in Indiana. This also means that the machine selected around 100 females and removed these from the incubation process.

The eggs from Kipster’s first in-ovo sexed flock will be available at King Soopers, City Market, Pick ‘n Save, Dillons, Fry’s, Smith’s, Mariano’s, Metro Market, and Kroger starting in December 2025. You won’t find any information about in-ovo sexing on the packaging until all Kipster eggs are free of male chick culling, by the end of 2026. By then, we plan to inform consumers that these eggs are free of male chick culling and therefore better hatched eggs by adding wording about this to the Certified Humane® label on our packaging.

The ASPCA has been working with egg companies, including Kipster, to bring more humanely hatched eggs to market.

“It’s time for the egg industry to right the wrong of routinely killing healthy male chicks, not only to spare millions of animals from an unimaginable fate but to also elevate the standards of egg production for workers and consumers. We commend Kipster’s steadfast commitment to ending the practice of male chick culling by leading the way as one of the first egg companies in the U.S. to adopt in-ovo sexing technology.” – Nancy Roulston, Senior Director of Corporate Policy and Animal Science, ASPCA

Why in-ovo sexing to stop male chick culling still leaves us uneasy

In an ideal world, we wouldn’t eat 26 billion broiler meat chickens per year. We wouldn’t hatch over 8 billion layer hens and cull over 8 billion roosters each year, globally. Instead, we’d like to see a world in which farmers use agricultural fields to grow nutritious crops to feed people instead of animals. A world in which by-products from crops and food production together with food waste can be fed to farmed animals who can convert this into food for people. This means a significant lower number of farmed animals would exist. We should treat the animals that remain with the best care possible. Even the roosters. We believe they should have a place in the food chain. By not letting them hatch at all, we continue a system in which we do not consume the valuable protein from roosters.

That’s why we’re not entirely comfortable with preventing male chicks from being born at all. Because they’re not useless. They just don’t fit the current food system. For now, in ovo-sexing is the best alternative we have. But it’s not where we want to stop.

For more in-depth answers to questions about why we do not consume meat from U.S. egg farms, read our blog about poultry meat