IPPE: Hy-Line International celebrates 90 years of genetic progress in layers
Hy-Line’s Jonathan Cade and Tom Dixon share the past, present and future expectations, including customer focus, global expansion and continued investment
22 April 2026
5 minute read
By: Jonathan Cade, president of Hy-Line International and Tom Dixon, global marketing at Hy-Line International, recently spoke to The Poultry Site’s Sarah Mikesell at 2026 IPPE in Atlanta, Georgia.
Jonathan, you're celebrating a big event at Hy-Line International – 90 years, how did you get here?
It's absolutely amazing to think from 1936 to 2026 and yes, it's great – it's absolutely fantastic! Our success during this time is the result of listening to our customers around the world. We've been feeding that back into what we need in our layer varieties to keep our customers producing eggs as efficiently as they possibly can.
Of course, that is then combined with the money that we've spent in research. Our spend on research is almost 20% of our turnover – we keep putting that back in. I think listening to our customers, getting the right people in place and investing over the years has brought us to this point.
Especially during the last few years, we have had heavy investments in farms and also in different techniques in the field of genetics. That's what has gotten us to 90 years, and we are looking forward to the next 90 years.
The industry is evolving, and you've seen the evolution, Jonathan.
Yes, exactly. Evolving production systems – just the sheer scale of our customers' businesses – are changing. We're a global business, but we really focus on being regional. Understanding culture, languages and visiting with our customers. I've spent a lot of time, being almost the Hy-Line Ambassador today, traveling extensively around the world to meet big egg producers.
One of our goals now is to get better relations with the bigger egg producers. We have a good distribution network of partners, but sometimes we're just one step behind the actual egg producer itself in the breeding side of our business. That's really the success that's been built over the last 90 years.
My question always is, 'where's Jonathan Cade today?' I see on LinkedIn; you are traveling the world meeting with customers. It's that boots on the ground approach, isn’t it?
Yes. It's a lot of traveling with a lot of nights and weekends away. Particularly in the emerging markets, I spend a lot of time now in India, China and in Southeast Asia. These are the emerging markets where all the population growth is and where all the egg consumption is increasing. And there's still a lot of opportunities for more growth.
Tom, you’ve been with the company for 32 years and have seen a lot. Tell us about the history of the business and what innovations started Hy-Line.
Hy-Line was established 90 years ago by Henry A. Wallace. He was out of the Wallace family, which at that time had a farm journal in the US, which was widely known named Wallace Farm Journal. He was steeped in agriculture and was well known.
He really had a passion for improving agriculture. He began dabbling in genetics at that time and helped start a genetics revolution. He established a well-known company selling corn hybrids, Pioneer Hybrid and it was so successful. He said, “Why not try the same concept with laying hens?”
He launched Hy-Line Farms in 1936 with a vision to improve laying hens, produce more eggs and feed more people a better protein 90 years ago. Today, we're taking on that vision of Dr. Wallace and applying it with our own geneticists with more technology. We're applying those same principles to feed the world with egg protein.
Tom, you've seen an evolution over the last 32 years. You talked about the history, but recently you've seen a lot of change?
Yes, the 32 years has flown by, and I really have seen a lot of change. The people are kind of the same. Now, I’m seeing the next generation getting into the business. There’s been a lot of change with technology, and there has been a lot of consolidation around the world. The farms are getting bigger and bigger. There have been bigger investments in facilities, cages and equipment, and aviaries have changed towards cage-free. The egg industry is a very dynamic, growing industry for sure. A lot has changed over the last three decades.
Jonathan, what's next? What can we expect from Hy-Line in the future?
Now we'll take what we've learned from the last 90 years, and we'll now apply more of it and make it better for the next 90. So, what I mean by that is our investments will continue. We need to be strategically in the right countries as well with high pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI). I hate to even bring HPAI up, but it's there and it's interrupting our business trade. Unfortunately, we are disappointing some of our customers because we have to delay, but we are listening, and we are trying to open facilities in different places.
Brazil is becoming more important for us as a base to supply from, but we can't keep producing and building new places. We need to make sure that we've got enough big hubs, so that we can make the order sizes that are getting bigger for our customers.
Then on top of that is the logistics, I see that as a challenge because airlines are becoming less and less the airlines that we can use. Yet we really are reliant on the airlines particularly to go to those emerging markets.
We are trying to produce so we can be closer to our customers. Chick quality is especially important and for the chicks to be certainly in good quality and alive when they reach their destination.
We'll also continue to evaluate and improve our varieties for all the different production systems. We're going to continue to keep having the best world-class technical support for our customers. We are now calling it our customer relationship group – before it was called sales, technical service and marketing – this is all together now.
Tom's heading up the global marketing with a few people supporting and then we've split up commercial and technical so we can be extremely focused on the service side. By doing this, we can get more local people who can visit farms and be available for deliveries to our customers.
That stuff is the icing on the cake – it's the thing that matters. I have prided myself for many years on relations with people. I love collaborating with our customers, and I want them to enjoy working with us. We've got a lot that we're going to keep doing. I mean we're just going to do more of what we've been doing but we're going to do it better.
