Hatchery Automation: From Vent Sexers to ABB Robots

A commercial hatchery turns fertile eggs into day-old chicks, and for most of its history nearly every step went through someone's hands. Staff candled eggs to find the infertile ones, moved them from setter trays to hatcher baskets, then sexed and often vaccinated each chick after it hatched. Hatchery automation takes over that work, from the transfer room to the chick boxes. This post follows the job from early incubators and Japanese vent sexing to in ovo vaccination, robot transfer heads and in-ovo sexing machines, then looks at this autumn's news and at where ABB robots could fit. Table eggs are a separate story, told in our post on egg handling robots.

Eggs on the upper trays and freshly hatched chicks on the lower trays of an incubator on display in Kuala Lumpur, 2015. Photo: Thomas Quine / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Egg ovens, candling lamps and vent sexers

Egyptians were already incubating eggs in oven-like buildings by 400 BC, and in 1747 the French scientist René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur presented an incubator design to the Académie des sciences. Lyman Byce built a coal lamp incubator in 1879. Ira M. Petersime of Gettysburg, Ohio, is credited with inventing the electric egg incubator in 1922; an early Petersime model held 15,000 eggs, and electric machines that size encouraged large commercial hatcheries. The checks inside those hatcheries stayed manual. Incubated eggs are candled, with a light shone through the shell, to find the ones that are not fertile, and in most hatcheries this happens on the 18th day, when the eggs also move to the hatcher.

A large cabinet incubator at the Nirenberg chicken farm in Ramatayim, 1946. Photo: Zoltan Kluger via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Vent sexing came from Japan. In 1933 Professors Masui and Hashimoto published a paper on the method, in which the sexer opens the chick's vent slightly and looks for the tiny bump that marks a male, and breeders either hired people trained in it or sent staff to Japan to learn. Vaccination was hand work too, and smaller hatcheries long relied on staff injecting each bird after hatch. In ovo vaccination changed that by putting the vaccine into the egg before the chick hatches. By 2011 Embrex's Inovoject had been at the front of in ovo technology for over 20 years, and a full-size machine could vaccinate up to 70,000 eggs an hour.

A B.C. Electric exhibition display on chick sexing, photographed in Vancouver in 1934, with a man demonstrating at the table. Photo: Pacific National Exhibition / City of Vancouver Archives via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Early sexing machines were simple instruments. The Keeler Optical and the Japanese Chicktester put a light at the end of a blunt telescopic tube so the sexer could see the testes or ovaries, and they have almost disappeared because the instruments and their spare parts can no longer be found. Robots arrived later, through KL Products in Canada, which filed a patent in 2009 for robots that destack and restack hatchery containers and transfer eggs into them. Zoetis bought KL in 2015. Its systems, developed with Fanuc, use a robotic head that lifts the vaccinated eggs together with the hatch basket, and KL also built the first automatic way of separating chicks from empty shells. Zoetis began offering the systems in Europe in 2019.

A Keeler Optical chick sexing instrument in its wooden case, the kind of tool that has almost disappeared from hatcheries. Photo: Pgrundmeier / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Gender sorting machines and in-ovo sexing today

Automated systems that find a chick's sex long before it hatches were first introduced in 2018. Some test fluid sampled from each egg; others use hyperspectral or MRI imaging. Germany and France banned all chick killing from 1 January 2022, and by May 2025 about 28 percent of the EU's commercial laying hens came from sexed eggs. In the US, Poultry World wrote in October 2026, the method is moving from pilot projects to commercial production. On 1 October 2026 NestFresh said 1.2 million chicks had hatched through its Humanely Hatched program, which uses Agri Advanced Technologies' non-invasive Cheggy system, and it expects 1.5 million by the end of the year.

Day-old chicks in a plastic crate in the Philippines, 2021. Photo: LubGua987 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sorting chicks after hatch is being automated as well. At VIV Europe 2026, Valentijn Crum of Ceva told aviNews that more poultry companies are moving to automated gender sorting because hatcheries struggle to recruit and keep workers. Ceva's Genesis equipment handles up to 50,000 chicks an hour per machine, and some US hatcheries run two in line for about 100,000 an hour. "One of the big challenges for the producers nowadays is the availability of human labor," Crum said. Injection accuracy is the other argument. A Zoetis report covered on 15 October 2026 claimed 99.6 percent site-of-injection accuracy for its Embrex devices in one trial, while two unnamed systems reached 86 and 77.4 percent in a separate trial.

Racks of ventilated cardboard boxes marked Bolan Chicks at the Bolan Poultry Farm in Hilmand province, Afghanistan, 2011. Photo: USAID Afghanistan via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

No source shows ABB robots working in a hatchery, so their place there is a possibility. The closest match is the IRB 360 FlexPicker, a delta robot that ABB offers with payloads from 1 to 8 kg. Its stainless option is IP69K validated, so it can be washed down with industrial detergents and high pressure hot water. That matters in a hatchery, where every tray, basket and box is cleaned after each production cycle. ABB's controllers let the robot follow fast-moving belts, the conveyor tracking skill that any robot handling eggs on a line would need. For stacking trays and boxes, ABB's four-axis IRB 660 palletizer is built for bags, boxes and crates and has a 3.15 m reach.

A wash-down version of ABB's FlexPicker delta robot being sprayed clean, as food lines require. Photo: ABB

Earlier sexing, cleaner robots and the jobs left for people

The next question is how early an egg can be sexed. German law first required sexing before day 7 of incubation and was later revised after a study found that embryos do not feel pain before day 13, and WATTPoultry reported on 5 October 2026 that a day 4 in-ovo sexing system will launch at IPPE 2027. Robot handling is likely to spread as well. The KL patent already describes robots destacking trays and moving eggs, and a palletizer such as the IRB 660 could in principle stack trays and boxes in a new hatchery, though ABB has announced no such project.

An ABB four-axis palletizing robot with a layer gripper in a packaging line cell. Photo: ABB

For households the change shows up on the egg carton. NestFresh sells its Humanely Hatched eggs through Whole Foods Market, H-E-B, Publix and other chains. In Germany, Respeggt eggs were in 1,350 REWE shops by September 2019 and cost about one euro cent more per egg, which shoppers paid. People who hatch a few eggs at home get none of this technology. Small keepers who cannot hire a chick sexer have to wait until the birds are four to six weeks old before they can tell the sexes apart, so a backyard hatch still includes cockerels along with the pullets.

A small foam egg incubator of the kind used at home, with an egg visible through its window, 2009. Photo: Alex Ford / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Money is the first open problem, and France offered €10 million in subsidies to help hatcheries buy in-ovo sexing machines. Accuracy is another, because errors scale: the Zoetis report works out that at 86 percent accuracy, about 140,000 of a million viable embryos would not get the vaccine where it should go. Hatcheries also need staff who can keep vision systems, injectors and robots running and clean. Where people and machines share a sexing or vaccination line, a cobot such as ABB's GoFa, which ABB designed to work beside people without fencing, is one option. A cell like that can be built and tested first in RobotStudio before it touches a single egg.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at a work table. Photo: ABB

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