24 February 2025

3 minute read

By: Sarah Mikesell

Europe

Joost ter Heerdt, one of the owners and commercial director of HatchTech, spoke to The Poultry Site’s Sarah Mikesell at the International Processing and Production Expo (IPPE) in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

Joost, tell us about HatchTech.

HatchTech is a Dutch company based in the center of Holland and is approximately 25 years old. We are active in various parts of the poultry industry, but one of our main product lines is incubation equipment - setters, hatchers, ventilation, cooling and heating. Everything that you need to equip an incubation plant - that's our main product.

We are a global company, and our sales team is active in many different regions. We work with distributors in about 30 countries. We also have our own offices in Beijing, Germany, Poland, Ukraine and Latin America.

Tell me a little bit about some of the challenges and issues that you see in the poultry industry.

One thing that I see, at least in our field of expertise, is in the incubation plant. There are products that are relatively old, whereas genetics have been really developing a lot over the last years. We see that the equipment in the hatcheries cannot really cope with the heat that is coming out of embryos. That is one of the challenges, and that results in lower performance incubation.

One way to improve incubation performance is to make sure the incubation equipment that is in the hatchery can at least cool the embryos that are inside there and to give that genetic potential a chance to survive.

This is also one of the products that we launched here at IPPE. It's called SetCare and it's focusing on making sure that we're doing everything possible for the embryos that go into an incubator to survive. I think there's a lot to gain there. There are a lot of breeders who lay eggs. We must make sure as an industry that every egg counts and that we make a chicken from that egg. That's what we try to do with innovative products such as SetCare, which we launched this year.

Every egg counts. In the US, we've seen table egg prices double, so eggs are becoming more valuable.

The egg prices that you are referring to are mainly consumption eggs. Of course, we are more in the hatching eggs sector; however, with both types, every egg does count.

If you look purely at hatching eggs, a hatching egg is a valuable part of the chain. We as a company have an influence on that so we must make sure that we make incubation equipment that is so good that it's worthwhile incubating it. Making sure that we get the maximum number of high quality chickens hatched and placed int the field so they can perform well.

Any other challenges or issues that you see in the industry that you're helping to solve?

Challenges that we face as an industry not only here in the US, but globally involve AI. I think it's a big topic now. AI will come and evolve over time, but it will never disappear again.

Another thing that we will probably face again soon is the volatility of prices of raw materials such as feed. I think that's a little bit the same as with the egg. We must make sure that once we put these birds in the field that they perform well because the highest percentage of the cost is still the feed. That’s what we try to do with our products.

With HatchCare, we try to give the newly born chicks feed and water directly after hatch and that gives them a better start in life. Once they arrive at the farm, they perform better and have better feed conversion. If you have better feed conversion, that's basically helping you indirectly to cope with the volatility of raw material prices.

Better incubation and better birds in the field - that's what we try to contribute to the industry challenges we are facing.