The Spreading, Game-Changing Technology To Avoid Killing Male Chicks

InnovationScienceThe Spreading, Game-Changing Technology To Avoid Killing Male ChicksByChristine Ro,Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Christine Ro is a journalist covering science and development.Follow AuthorJun 11, 2026, 08:44pm EDTNestFresh branding, including the text "humanely Hatched." Credit NestFresh.NestFreshOn a Sunday 40 years ago, the egg-industry executive Michael I. Sencer had an unforgettable experience.He was visiting a large California egg ranch with his family, so that his children could watch baby chicks coming out of the incubators. As they emerged, workers would separate the males and females, tossing the male chicks into trash cans lined with plastic bags. Sencer still remembers vividly that “when they would fill them with the baby male chicks, they basically would just close them up and suffocate them.”His young daughter tugged at him. What were they doing, she wondered. “I explained to her that the males in the egg industry were useless and that’s what they did: they disposed of them. And oh, she didn’t talk to me for a long time. So that really impacted me personally.”It’s still the case in the U.S. egg industry that while female chicks are allowed to grow into egg-laying hens, the male chicks are killed en masse. This amounts to hundreds of millions of chicks a year. The standard practice now is to use not plastic bags, but machines called macerators with rotating blades. These shred the chicks quickly, in a brutally efficient process. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Sencer, now the senior vice president for the food company Hidden Villa Ranch, realized this a few years ago, while reading international trade publications. He learned of Europe’s track record with a technology called in-ovo sexing, following multiple countries’ regulations on chick culling. Germany banned chick culling back in 2022, even before commercially viable in-ovo sexing machines existed. Sencer soon flew to...