An interview with Prof. Dani Offen and Yehuda Elram, the founders of eggXYt, one of Forward Fooding’s top 500 Food Tech startups.

It’s time to put a face to the name…

We asked our FoodTech500 top-runners to give us a bit of insight into how they started out as a company and their thoughts on the role of technology in Food innovation. Meet Dani and Yehuda, the founding duo behind eggXYt, a biotechnology company that enables sex detection of chick embryos immediately after the eggs are laid. Let’s see what they had to say.

So tell us a little bit more about you! Where did the idea for your FoodTech company come from?

Dani: My grandfather was an egg merchant. I myself lived most of my life in Kfar HaRoeh village, so I should’ve known about the culling of male chicks in the egg industry. And yet, I learned about it only 5 years ago. I was blown away by the sheer size of the problem. Indeed, the number of chicks killed every year – 8 billion – really struck me. This issue kept bothering me, from an ethical perspective but also as an intellectual challenge.

How is tech central to your business?

Dani and Yehuda: eggXYt’s CRISPR based proprietary technology revolutionizes the chicken industry. Using a biomarker on the male chromosome of a chicken embryo, the sex of the chick is detectable once the egg is laid, and more importantly before the chick hatches. Scanning the egg through the shell, eggXYt is saving billions of dollars on incubation and manual sexing costs. 8 billion male chicks will be saved from unnecessary incubation and immediate killing, and the male non-incubated eggs could be repurposed to be used in the food, pharma or cosmetic industries. The eggXYt layers lay ethical “male chick culling free eggs”, responding to the demand of conscientious consumers.

Why do you think it’s important to see the food industry embrace tech?

Dani and Yehuda: Consumer trust has been repeatedly challenged by discoveries of unethical, unsustainable and unhealthy practices that prevail in the food industry. Technology provides the food industry a chance to regain consumer trust and reinvent itself to meet consumer demand for healthy, transparent and sustainable food production. eggXYt is one example, in which the use of technology allows avoiding the culling of 8 billion male chicks each year. But the application of other technologies, such as precision agriculture, blockchain, genetics and robotics, has the potential to transform the way we make food. It is important that the food industry embraces these technologies to unlock the potential they hold for the industry and for consumers.

 

 

Want to know more? See eggXYt’s full profile here.

Congratulations again to eggXYt for ranking ninth in the category “Agtech” of the Foodtech 500 list.

To find out who else made it into the FoodTech 500; the top Food Tech companies in the world, click here.

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