Terrence O’Keefe: Welcome to this episode of WATT Poultry Chat. We're coming to you live from IPPE 2025. My name is Terrence O'Keefe, I'm the content director for WATT Global Media. With me today at the TARGAN booth is Ramin Karimpour, CEO and founder of TARGAN. Ramin, TARGAN’s WingScan system allows for sex sorting of broiler chicks. What advantages are there to raising and processing the males and females separately?
Ramin Karimpour: Well, there are quite a few advantages. Both, in the hatchery, where it allows for reduced labor, very accurate sexing. In the farm, it improves the FCR. And in the processing plant, there are exceptional yield improvements that we have seen so far. Many of those who were already in the industry sexing by manual labor are now seeing much better accuracy and much better, in the farm, seven-day mortality, which is because of the automation that WingScan brings.
Terrence O’Keefe: What's unique about the WingScan system and how it operates?
Ramin Karimpour: It is the very first fully automated sexing machine for broiler chicks. By that, I mean there is no need for anybody spreading the chicks before they get to the machine. The length and size are adjustable in such a way that we can have modularity going into a hatchery that is doing half a million chick a week all the way to three or four million chicks a week.
We can go from 40,000 chicks processed per hour all the way to 160,000 per hour. That brings a lot of unique performance capabilities, and we have had very good, 98%, accuracy on average across over 750 million chicks already sexed. And, we have been in the market for almost a year and a half right now.
As such, we have been able to monitor our uptime, and I'm very happy to say that we have had a 99.1% uptime across all our systems in the field in the US and Canada so far.
Terrence O’Keefe: How does WingScan fit into TARGAN’s mission of building a more sustainable food supply?
Ramin Karimpour: WingScan affords poultry producers to have higher yields and better FCR. So, it saves them feed in the farm, it saves them a lot of meat on the bone - that then doesn't go to waste and goes into packing, which will help and enable them to maintain their sustainability with the current supply as is. So, increase yield, improve meat production and lower the costs.
Terrence O’Keefe: WingScan is TARGAN’s first product on the market, when I attended the ribbon cutting for TARGAN’s headquarters, you were developing a system for individually vaccinating chicks by eye drop. How's the development of this product coming along?
Ramin Karimpour: This is a great question. The Vaccine Delivery System (VDS) was actually our very first attempt to get a machine that would help the poultry industry have close to 100% vaccination of individual chicks. We don't treat the chicks as a flock. We individually treat them through the system and that machine is about to go back into the field for full trials this year, and we expect to commercialize it end of ‘25, early ‘26.
And that's going to enable a much, much better vaccination, especially for coccidiosis and other infections, such as bronchitis and other lung diseases that poultry producers face.
Terrence O’Keefe: This WATT Poultry Chat is brought to you by TARGAN, an innovative animal tech systems company focused on transforming animal protein production industries worldwide. Founded in 2015 and based in Raleigh, North Carolina, the company's mission is to provide affordable individual technologies that will improve speed, accuracy and animal welfare. Thanks for joining us today.
