From chick sexing to precision vaccines: TARGAN’s vision for the future of poultry

20 January 2026

6 minute read

By: Sarah Mikesell

Europe

North America

Asia

Oceania

Ramin Karimpour, CEO at TARGAN Inc., speaks to The Poultry Site’s Sarah Mikesell at the TARGAN global headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. 

After an excellent tour of your office, it’s nice to see that you have a lot of room to grow. Tell us about TARGAN and your plans for the future?

We have been growing for the last 10 years and just passed our decade milestone this summer, so we had a big celebration of it. The team has grown to 150+ people globally, and when we started in 2015, it was only four people. I expect this to continue, and that's one of the reasons we have such a big site here in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina – to accommodate TARGAN’s growth. 

There was a need for an automated way to identify the sex of broiler chicks, and TARGAN's WingScan solution changed the industry. Tell us a little bit more about the technology that you've developed. 

From the very beginning, the majority of poultry producers have wanted to sex chickens. They have always been aware that sexing and growing males and females separately has major advantages with regard to how they feed the chickens and the feed conversion rate (FCR). 

Separation also impacts how uniform they will become and set the stage for feeders and waterer heights for the male versus the female. They have been aware of the yield improvements due to uniformity in the processing plants. However, the lack of labor has always contributed to not being able to sex chicks, broiler chick in particular. 

WingScan was the first fully automated, no labor needed sexing machine. It has provided the capability for any broiler producer with any size hatchery to go all the way from a small hatchery sorting 250,000 birds per week to large hatcheries who are sorting 3 million+ birds per week. 

Our machine can provide this because it's customizable and is very capable to run at high efficiency with 98% plus accuracy, delivering the throughput necessary with minimal labor requirement and maximum animal friendliness. 

Tell folks who've maybe never heard of WingScan – what is the technology doing? 

The technology is simply passing the birds through the system and looking at the wings of the bird. Based on the feather patterns, it determines if it is male or a female and then separates them gently into two different lines – a male line and female line. 

Again, this enables the poultry producers to have much higher efficiency with regard to uniformity, diet, and even setting up the right heights for water feeders and feeders themselves, so they have best outcome with regard to sustainability of food and water. 

Where is WingScan being used now and what markets are you expanding into? 

We started in the US, and we currently have more than 40 systems installed in the US, Canada and Europe. We are expanding globally at the present time. There is high interest for us in Latin America, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, in particular, the Middle East and Oceania. We have had quite a few interests coming from that side of the ocean. 

We are now on the path forward to commercially make it a viable solution for many of our poultry producers across the entire globe. Quite frankly, the excitement comes from the fact that, until today, to have sexing done was always known as a benefit for producers. The lack of labor was the main cause that they did not start sexing. 

With the fully automated machines that can do wing scanning, they can scan between 40,000 to 160,000 birds per hour without additional labor needed. A lot of producers are adapting to technology and that's why WingScan is moving across the world. 

Labor is such a global issue, right? 

Absolutely. Labor is becoming a more and more challenging story. The majority of the people who can work in these locations seem to be looking for other alternative jobs rather than manual labor. As technology progresses, labor will become more and more of a challenge, especially where poultry producers are producing, which is not really located where producers can find labor cheap. This is the main reason for us being successful with providing a fully automated, no labor-needed systems to gender-sex chickens. 

TARGAN has plans to launch a precision vaccination system in 2026. Tell us about this new technology you're developing. 

It is really a continuation of the strategies of the technologies that we use – artificial intelligence, high speed imaging and microdose delivery of vaccines. We started the company trying to do the vaccine delivery first. We just happened to get lucky and get the gender identification machine out first. 

The precision vaccination system will be introduced in 2026. The fundamental proposition is we are not going to be treating flocks – we are going to be individually treating birds. 

Considering that we have 73 billion broilers being produced every year, it's hard to actually treat them individually. But a machine like ours does individually treat 40,000 to 160,000 chicks per hour very humanely and by giving a proper dose.

It delivers a spray into the eye of about 14 microliters of all vaccines. We can address almost all the top 10 diseases in poultry, in particular coccidiosis, infectious bronchitis, New Castle disease, Salmonella and E. coli.  We can deliver all these vaccines through our system. 

That's exciting technology coming soon. I saw some of the things that you were working on in the shop here, and it looks like it's going to revolutionize the industry. 

That is the plan. We want to bring very high tech, which is very approachable and usable to the poultry production process and increases the efficiencies – both in the hatchery and on the farm with regard to feed conversion, handling of the birds and in processing plant by providing uniformity to the flock which impacts processing. We are making sure that the yields are as high as possible. 

We're going to have a triple impact. Then when the vaccine delivery comes in, it will increase the efficiency of vaccination to close to 95%+, which currently is around 30% to 50%, which means this is going to have a major impact on sustainability.

What's next for TARGAN? What future projects are you working on? 

I look at TARGAN as a technology powerhouse, applying itself and its knowledge and capabilities and processes to all protein meat production. We have few other ideas for poultry that I cannot talk about at the current moment, but after poultry we will apply vaccination technologies to both swine and aquaculture. Using the same technologies we have with artificial intelligence high speed imaging, we can do automatic swine vaccination and automatic aquaculture fish vaccination in the water, which is not possible today. We have patented technologies that we are going to utilize. By 2028 or 2029, we will produce those machines for the swine and aquaculture industries.

The aquaculture industry is so exciting. It's just an exploding industry right now.

Aquaculture is growing at a rate of 18% a year . It is one of the largest protein meat productions in the world. The biggest challenge that they have is that almost 60% of the fish do not make it from 20 centimeters to about 60 centimeters. That's because it's extremely hard to vaccinate them, both in the aqua hatchery and in the ocean. There are some mechanisms mechanically, but they have a lot of fatalities. Then you go into the ocean, there is absolutely no way to vaccinate them in the ocean. That is going to be where we will have another major impact for the aquaculture industry.