4 February 2025

3 minute read

By: TARGAN

Animal AgTech company TARGAN has bolstered its presence in the Canadian poultry industry through a new partnership with Boire & Frères. The US-based manufacturer has delivered two of its automated chick feather sex identification units to Canada’s largest hatchery in Québec.

Jean-Guy Robillard, General Manager at Boire & Frères said: “The standout improvement for us is efficiency, which makes a big impact when your hatchery is averaging at 600,000 chicks a day like ours. Before WingScan, we manually sexed 70,000 chicks per hour, that’s now up by more than 50% to 110,000 chicks per hour. You can imagine the difference that makes for the rest of our operations, and for our customers – it’s really a game changer.”

With more than half a billion birds processed to date, the WingScan System offers an unprecedented throughput of up to 160,000 chicks per hour, depending on configuration. This speed means birds can reach the farm, food, and water faster. The AI recognition and identification means birds are handled less – offering hatcheries enhanced animal care.

Ali Matloub, Director of Technical Sales and Business Development for International Markets at TARGAN, said: "We are proud to partner with Boire & Frères, a company with a long-standing reputation for delivering high-quality poultry to their customers. At TARGAN, we are committed to supporting Boire in their pursuit of excellence.”

Patrick Poulin, Boire Hatchery Director, added: “We anticipated more time to adjust to the new system, but it really is ‘plug and play.’ The training provided by TARGAN was fantastic, and obviously this means that WingScan can save us an incredible amount of time with our own staff training. What’s also been very impressive is the accuracy we’ve been recording with our two systems; it has been over 98 percent – a significantly more rigorous standard than manual sexing.”

Feather sexing, manual or automated, allows hatcheries to better meet specific weight goals for customers and offers farms the ability to implement gender-specific rearing strategies. Further down the line, at the processing plants, more uniform birds can move through primary and secondary processing more efficiently with reduced risk of machine downtime and the need for recalibration due to a wider margin of bird weight and size, optimizing the broiler production value chain at multiple stages.

Ramin Karimpour, Founder and CEO, at TARGAN said: “Boire & Frères was one of the first Canadian customers to install two of our systems, operating up to 16 lanes between the two WingScan units. And as Canada’s largest hatchery, it serves as testament to the suitability and ease-of-use for hatcheries of any size. We are confident in our technology and its ability to deliver unmatched efficiency and consistency, aligning with our primary goal of enhancing production and performance for our customers, ultimately benefiting the broader animal protein industry.”

Founded in 1927 in Wickham, Quebec, Boire & Frères remains a family business and a leader in the North American poultry industry. The company’s approach is defined by its decades of expertise and customer focus. Boire & Frères operates 3 hatcheries and 58 production sites with 157 barns across Québec, with more than 550 employees serving customers across four production sectors: hatcheries, breeding farms, reproduction farms and broiler farms.