Review maps ways to cut wasted eggs and cull less day-old chicks

It argues better, integrated testing before incubation and for egg sex could improve both economics and animal welfare.

Editorial illustration — not from the study.

The global poultry industry relies on eggs and incubators, but the review highlights two linked problems. First, some eggs that are not viable get through pre-incubation, wasting part of incubation capacity. Second, after hatch, male day-old layer chicks are typically euthanized, with the review citing annual losses of 7 billion day-old layer chicks.

The paper focuses on detection technologies that do not harm embryos or require opening eggs. The authors say prior research has often treated “egg freshness” checks and “in-egg sex detection” as separate efforts, leaving a lab-to-field gap. They lay out a unified, process-based framework and evaluate sensing options across the hatching timeline, emphasizing where implementation tends to fail.

Key bottlenecks and proposed workflow

The review estimates that pre-incubation quality degradation can waste up to 15% of incubation capacity on non-viable eggs. It reports that available non-destructive detection research often shows classification accuracy above 90% in controlled laboratory settings, but that practical deployment is held back by cross-batch generalizability, embryonic biosafety assurance, and the ability to run at high speed online. It also describes a hierarchical detection strategy with closed-loop traceability to connect lab performance to industrial use.

Why deployment is difficult

By focusing on where detection systems break down outside the lab, the review explains why eggs may be wasted and why billions of day-old chicks are euthanized. The proposed end-to-end workflow aims to support both economic efficiency and ethical sustainability, based on the bottlenecks the authors identify.

Review-level evidence and gaps

This is a review article that synthesizes existing research and evaluates sensing modalities and workflow design across the poultry hatching cycle. Because it is not a new experiment, it does not provide new measured results; instead, it summarizes patterns reported in earlier studies. The abstract also indicates that evidence for real-world translation depends on factors like batch-to-batch performance, biosafety checks, and throughput, which can limit how readily laboratory accuracy translates to farms.

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