UK retailers are blocking moves to end the killing of millions of day-old male chicks each year, farmers and breeding companies have said.
The industrial-scale culling of unwanted chicks is common practice around the world, with 330 million males slaughtered by crushing or gassing each year in Europe, according to campaigners, 29 million of those in the UK.
The industry has no use for cockerels that cannot lay eggs or be fattened up quickly enough to be sold for meat.
But it is possible for farmers to avoid the mass culling through breeding technology already in use in France and Germany.
Germany brought in legislation to outlaw the killing of day-old male chicks at the start of 2022, while French poultry farmers have until the end of this year to comply with a new law banning the practice. The UK has no such legislation.
Respeggt, a German service provider of in-ovo egg sexing, uses its patented Seleggt process to identify and prevent the hatching of male chicks. On the ninth day of incubation, a small drop of liquid is extracted from the eggs and analysed. Once hatcheries know which eggs will hatch into male chicks, they can repurpose them for other uses.
Breeding companies say UK supermarkets are, so far, not keen to promote eggs that don’t contribute to the killing of male chicks alongside their existing stock.
Carmen Uphoff, Respeggt’s chief operating officer, said: “We are trying to enter the UK, but have so far been unsuccessful.
“Retail will say there is no consumer demand, then the hatcheries and packing centres will say there is no demand from retailers and it goes around in circles.
“We are trying to talk to everyone, but the trouble with the UK is people are not aware [of where eggs come from]. We are trying to adopt different strategies and enter in a small way to learn how the UK works.”
She added: “I have suggested starting with just one brand that is ‘free of chick culling’ on the shelves but, again, the response is that the customer will realise all the other eggs are ‘with chick culling’, and they wouldn’t have known that before.”
Piggotts Poultry Breeders, a small family-run company in Hertfordshire, is the only UK firm selling laying chickens sourced from eggs using Respeggt’s technology – something owner Richard Piggott described as an “embarrassment”.
Piggott has sold about 6,000 chickens so far to small-scale and hobby chicken farmers. He said the additional cost incurred from “free of chick-culling eggs” was not as big an issue as retailers fearing reputational damage as consumers understand the egg supply chain better.
“I thought everyone in the UK would really, really want to go for it and that hasn’t been the case,” he said. “We contacted Respeggt because we couldn’t get the birds in the UK. We asked to buy some chicks from a hatchery in the Netherlands that has the technology to do the in-egg sexing.
“They came to see us last year and explained they had been in the UK two years before to speak to the big hatcheries and the big players in the sector, but they just weren’t interested for various reasons.”
While most of the birds Piggott has sold end up in people’s back gardens, he admitted it is “frustrating” that commercial egg producers are failing to embrace technology readily available on the market to avoid the mass killing of chicks.
He is also pessimistic that anything will change in the short-term and said it would have to be “consumer-driven” by people writing to their MPs and retailers.
“It was always difficult before [the cost of living crisis] but my understanding was that once the egg got to the supermarket shelf, the price difference was going to be between 5p and 8p, which isn’t massive,” he said.
The British Retail Consortium said retailers continue to work with farmers on improving the welfare of laying hens and would “continue to consider all research which could further improve the high standards currently in place”.
In France, the government has committed €10m (£8.65m) to gender testing machines for commercial hatcheries, as well as advocating for a fairer distribution of costs across the supply chain.
“We are in the process of finding a solution to the destruction of male day-old chicks here in France,” said Pierre Lanckriet, who works at a hatchery near Amiens in the north of France. “We know it will be banned from 1 January next year and we’ve been readying ourselves for that since the beginning of 2021.
“Since it was an obligation from the governments in Germany and France, a lot of companies have started to work in that field and the price of the technology has dropped considerably.”
There are several methods, varying in accuracy and cost, on the market, including MRI scans of eggs to determine sexual organs after 12 days, detecting the colour of feathers and in-ovo sexing.
Italy could be next to end the practice of slaughtering male day-old chicks, with plans to introduce a law by late 2026.
The Guardian contacted the British Egg Industry Council for comment, but it did not respond.
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