This article is published as a part of a partnership with Future Food Asia. Soos Technology is one of the 11 finalists of the US$100,000 Future Food Asia (FFA) 2020 Award to be hosted from September 21-25.
What comes first, chicken or egg?
It is a classic question. But even eggs are not born equal. The poultry industry is tasked to provide, with chicken meat and eggs, a cheap protein source for fighting global hunger. And so for farm owners, every point of profit counts.
But hatching male layers is pointless (male broilers are still the star of the farm) and has led to this disastrous industry practice of male culling. What if humans could work hand in hand with Mother Nature and put an end to it?
Enter Soos Technology, an Israeli startup that has developed for chicken a sex-reversal technology, something the aquaculture industry has been practicing for many years.
Soos’ proprietary incubation system affects the sex development process and turns genetic males into functional female chicks. While the industry has been obsessed with early sex detection, with solutions that are still sub-optimal in terms of biosecurity and efficiency, Soos deals with the root cause of the problem.
Music to chicks’ ears
Yael Alter, CEO and Founder of “Soos Technology” said that the idea for Soos started after she met her colleague and co-founder Nashat Haj Mohammad in an industry event. He had discovered that sound vibrations could induce sex reversal in poultry embryos.
As an industry veteran, Yael realised this was a game-changer for the poultry industry. Every year, the egg industry exterminates 7.5 billion male chicks since they have no commercial use. It’s not just an ethical issue, it’s also a plain waste of resources.
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Instead of putting two million eggs in incubators you can get the same result with one million if you can tell male from female before. Together with Nashat, Yael decided to turn the challenge into an opportunity and make it a business.
Soos started off with small laboratory incubators of 50-100 eggs on which the concept was validated. They then expanded their R&D facility to include three industrial incubators, a pullet house for 1,500 pullets and a layer house.
These figures are still modest for an industry where the average hatchery hatches 164,000 eggs per year but they enabled Soos to fine-tune the technology and reach a good level of repeatability.
It is essential if you want to disrupt a well-established industry where production is demand-driven and hatcheries need to be very precise on forecasting their output. Otherwise, capex is engaged, and incubators could remain idle.
Soos brilliantly illustrates that improving animal welfare (by saving billions of male chicks from a gruesome death each year) and improving profitability are compatible, with the right level of innovation and technology.
At a time where alternative proteins are the talk of the town in the VC industry, Soos is here to remind us that there are unaddressed challenges in the animal protein industry, and more talents are needed to address them.
Where are the males?
Speaking of talents, since the company’s establishment in 2017, Yael was lucky enough to be able to recruit a team of extremely talented and dedicated individuals, sharing the same vision to transform the poultry industry.
But is it really luck? Yael’s enthusiasm is infectious, not to mention the psyche, perseverance and grit she has demonstrated all along.
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Since Soos was announced a finalist of Future Food Asia 2020 (FFA2020) finalist Yael is excited to see the interest for Soos from all over the region. As one of the rare female entrepreneurs in the male-dominated agritech industry, Yael is rightly proud of her achievements and she hopes to see more and more women in high positions in this and other industries.
A cause she will be able to advance further thanks to this exposure.
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Image credit: Rebekah Howell on Unsplash
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