Better Hatch Network

Roughly seven billion male chicks are killed each year in the global egg industry, within hours of hatching, because they can't lay eggs and haven't been bred for meat. It's a structural result of how layer breeds have been bred for nearly a century, playing out in nearly every country that produces eggs, and until recently, hatcheries had no commercially viable way to avoid it.

A technology, called in-ovo sexing, to end this already exists, and has for years.

How In-Ovo Sexing Works

In-ovo sexing determines a chick's sex early in incubation, before the point researchers associate with the onset of pain perception, so male eggs can be identified and removed while only female eggs are incubated through to hatching. It's commercially proven at scale, running in European hatcheries for close to a decade with accuracy rates above 98 percent, and Germany and France have banned chick culling outright since 2022, with Italy's ban set to take effect by the end of this year.

The Adoption Gap

Outside Europe, and a handful of installations across North and South America, in-ovo sexing barely exists. Asia alone produces roughly six in ten of the world's eggs, making it the largest egg-producing region on earth, and until mid-2026, not a single hatchery across the entire Asia-Pacific region had a commercial in-ovo sexing machine running. That gap, between a solved problem and the infrastructure needed to bring it to a new region, is what Better Hatch Network exists to close.

What We Do

Better Hatch Network is a deployment intermediary, not a technology company. We're technology-neutral across providers, and our role is to be the connective tissue between proven technology and industry adoption: brokering relationships between hatcheries, egg producers, retailers, and regulators, and building the case each stakeholder needs to move forward. We work directly and collaboratively with industry at every step, focused on making adoption as straightforward and commercially sound as possible for the partners we work with.

Who We Are

Better Hatch Network was co-founded by Amanda Littlewood and Aditi Basu, who bring complementary backgrounds in operations and programme management, and engineering, energy-transition consulting, and startup building, respectively. We're fiscally sponsored by Sparkwell.

Why This Matters, And Why Now

Ending male chick culling isn't only an animal welfare outcome, it's a supply chain and food security one too. Freeing up hatchery capacity currently spent incubating, and culling roughly half of all chicks produced means faster recovery from disease outbreaks, lower long-term operating costs, and a more resilient egg supply for a region that depends on eggs as a primary source of affordable protein for billions of people.

The technology is ready, and the economics increasingly work. What's missing is coordination, market by market, hatchery by hatchery, to bring them together, and that's what the work Better Hatch Network was built to do. Every dollar of support helps us move faster.