MRI-based egg sexing that avoids chick culling starts running in the US

Orbem's MRI-and-AI system identifies chick sex before hatching, letting hatcheries skip incubating and culling male layer eggs.

Orbem, a Munich startup founded in 2019, has begun operating its first MRI-based in-ovo chick sexing system in the US, with a second installation expected mid-August and a third planned for 2027. The company opened a Texas office in 2025. In-ovo sexing determines a chick's sex before hatching, so hatcheries can remove male layer eggs rather than incubate them 21 days and cull the chicks after hatch. Male chick culling is already banned in Germany and France and will be prohibited in Italy in January.

Orbem's Genus Focus system combines MRI and AI to identify the embryo's reproductive organs, which begin differentiating around day six, with the algorithms working best on days 11 and 12. The company says it acquires and analyzes an image in under a second at 99.5% accuracy, and can scale up to 24,000 eggs per hour. It runs a pay-per-use model that adds about one cent per table egg, and already operates in France, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Norway.

For sustenance, this cuts waste at the front of egg production: fewer resources spent incubating eggs that will be discarded, and a route to end mass culling without banning it outright. Orbem estimates that installing systems at 12-15 large US layer hatcheries could cover a substantial share of national egg production, with about two years to replace the laying flock.

Many figures come from Orbem and are not independently verified, the US hatcheries are unnamed, and United Egg Producers says the technology must prove economically and operationally feasible before wide adoption. Whether it moves from niche to mainstream in the US remains unresolved.

Source: AgFunder News