InOvotive | In Ovo’s automated sexing solution for chicken eggs

Summary
In Ovo is a company that develops products for the worldwide poultry industry that improve both resource efficiency and animal welfare. In Ovo is a spinoff from Leiden University and applies scientific knowledge to realise great solutions.

We have partnered with key stakeholders from the European poultry value chain and are on track to deliver our first product to the market: an automated sexing solution for fertilised chicken eggs. This will make the killing of 6.5 billion male chicks in the egg producing industry obsolete. As such, we will solve one of the largest and oldest problems for the poultry sector.

Our in ovo sexing solution is an automated, accurate and high-throughput biochemical screening. This high-tech solution enables hatcheries to remove male eggs from incubators early in the breeding process, allowing them to hatch only female layer chickens. The increase in animal welfare results in a value increase of layer chickens and the end-product: table eggs in the supermarket.

In 2016, we identified a single biomarker that allows for the fast, high-throughput, determination of the sex of an egg. Since 2017 we have been developing our current Alpha prototype, realising a throughput of 1,800 eggs per hour with 95% accuracy. Now, in this project, we will scale this prototype to realise the required throughput defined by the sector: 10,000 eggs per hour.

This will enable hatcheries to process their complete capacity using an in-line process. We believe that a technical innovation is only as good as the business case that is being built around it. Therefore, we not only develop clever technologies, but use our network to demonstrate our in ovo sexing solution to mobilise every stakeholder of this problem and ensure a quick market adoption.
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More information & hyperlinks
Web resources: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/959321
Start date: 01-06-2020
End date: 31-05-2022
Total budget - Public funding: 3 520 293,00 Euro - 2 464 205,00 Euro
Cordis data

Original description

In Ovo is a company that develops products for the worldwide poultry industry that improve both resource efficiency and animal welfare. In Ovo is a spinoff from Leiden University and applies scientific knowledge to realise great solutions.

We have partnered with key stakeholders from the European poultry value chain and are on track to deliver our first product to the market: an automated sexing solution for fertilised chicken eggs. This will make the killing of 6.5 billion male chicks in the egg producing industry obsolete. As such, we will solve one of the largest and oldest problems for the poultry sector.

Our in ovo sexing solution is an automated, accurate and high-throughput biochemical screening. This high-tech solution enables hatcheries to remove male eggs from incubators early in the breeding process, allowing them to hatch only female layer chickens. The increase in animal welfare results in a value increase of layer chickens and the end-product: table eggs in the supermarket.

In 2016, we identified a single biomarker that allows for the fast, high-throughput, determination of the sex of an egg. Since 2017 we have been developing our current Alpha prototype, realising a throughput of 1,800 eggs per hour with 95% accuracy. Now, in this project, we will scale this prototype to realise the required throughput defined by the sector: 10,000 eggs per hour.

This will enable hatcheries to process their complete capacity using an in-line process. We believe that a technical innovation is only as good as the business case that is being built around it. Therefore, we not only develop clever technologies, but use our network to demonstrate our in ovo sexing solution to mobilise every stakeholder of this problem and ensure a quick market adoption.

Status

CLOSED

Call topic

EIC-SMEInst-2018-2020

Update Date

27-10-2022
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Horizon 2020
H2020-EU.2. INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP
H2020-EU.2.1. INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies
H2020-EU.2.1.0. INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Cross-cutting calls
H2020-EIC-SMEInst-2018-2020
H2020-EIC-SMEInst-2018-2020-3
H2020-EU.2.3. INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Innovation In SMEs
H2020-EU.2.3.0. INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Innovation In SMEs - Cross-cutting calls
H2020-EIC-SMEInst-2018-2020
H2020-EIC-SMEInst-2018-2020-3
H2020-EU.3. SOCIETAL CHALLENGES
H2020-EU.3.0. Cross-cutting call topics
H2020-EIC-SMEInst-2018-2020
H2020-EIC-SMEInst-2018-2020-3