Question: why are your rotisserie chickens hens not roosters?
Answer: because roosters don’t reach adulthood.

Welcome to Costs Matter, a series that asks different questions all of which have the same answer: to better manage costs. The costs are frequently economic though not always. The series focuses narrowly on the impact of costs. It does not claim these costs are the sole cause. To read more in the series, visit https://medium.com/galileo-onwards/costs/home.

Rotisserie chickens are sold by commercial hatcheries and when you’re in the business of selling eggs, you don’t want a product that produces no eggs. So, to save costs, commercial hatcheries eliminate their male chicks as early as they can. In fact, only a small minority of roosters are allowed to survive to adulthood and the ones that do are used exclusively for breeding. In fact, if you’re managing a hatchery, you would only see a rooster as a waste of feed, water, and space.

In fact, this requirement for hatcheries, namely, eliminating male chicks as early as possible, has led to an industry called “chick sexing”. Wikipedia, as always, has an interesting page on it at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_sexing.

Why something complicated like chick sexing? Why not just take rooster semen and inseminate hens with just the female sperm? That is a question to be answered in another Costs Matter post.

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