Grimaud Brand Guidelines: Muscovy Ducks From Roussay, Hyplus Rabbits & a Family Group

Two farming brothers and their Muscovy ducks.

Grimaud began on a farm in the west of France. The company’s own history says that in 1966 the brothers Joseph and Bernard Grimaud, farmers at Roussay in Maine-et-Loire, started breeding Muscovy ducks — canards de Barbarie in French — and selecting the best birds to improve their results. The company presents this as the start of the genetic selection that is still its core trade, and for years it traded as Grimaud Frères, “Grimaud Brothers,” a name its duck business still carries.

Science arrived early. In 1970, the group says, it formed a partnership with INRA, France’s national agricultural research institute, and by 1976 a Muscovy line selected under a programme defined with INRA was being exported for the first time. On 1 January 1980 the company name Groupe Grimaud La Corbière was registered, with its head office at Roussay on the family’s land; Roussay is now part of the commune of Sèvremoine, which is the address the group gives today.

The 1980s widened the range of species. In 1984, the company says, it set up its own rabbit-selection programme with INRA in Toulouse under a new brand, Hyplus; in 1986 it opened a Muscovy operation in the San Francisco area; and in 1989, after more than twenty years with the Muscovy, it began selecting Pekin and then Mulard ducks. The same year, again with INRA, it started a pigeon-improvement programme and a subsidiary called Europigeon. Purchases of duck hatcheries followed from 1990, among them Avi-Bocage and Le Couvoir du Moulin Brûlé, and later Charloux and Croisé.

Chickens, pigs, shrimp and a biotech side.

The second generation took the business abroad. According to the group, Frédéric Grimaud joined the family firm in the early 1990s; he now leads it as chairman and chief executive, answering to an eight-member shareholders’ strategic council. Under him the duck business moved into Asia: a first genetics subsidiary at Chengdu in 1996, others in Fujian around 2000 and in Shaanxi in 2018, and Grimaud Vietnam in 2009. An Italian subsidiary, Grimaud Italia, has handled Hyplus rabbits in Italy since 1992.

For about a decade the group was also a large chicken breeder. In 2005 it bought Hubbard, the broiler-breeding company, from Merial, the trade magazine Zootecnica International reported in 2017; Grimaud’s own timeline says the deal let it claim second place in world poultry genetics. It started a layer business, Novogen, in 2008, and took a stake in the Dutch layer hatchery Verbeek in 2014. Pig genetics came through acquisitions in the United States in 2008 and of the French breeder Pen Ar Lan in 2011, merged in 2013 as Choice Genetics. In 2013 the group also took over Galor, a French guinea-fowl breeder, and with the Mahr group founded Blue Genetics, which breeds shrimp.

Alongside the animals sat biotechnology. The group says it created Vivalis in 1999 to work on avian stem cells and cell lines for vaccine production; Vivalis was listed on the stock market in 2007 and in 2013 merged with Austria’s Intercell to form Valneva. A veterinary-vaccine company, Filavie, followed in 2002. Today Grimaud describes two connected trades: animal genetic selection and bioproductions, in which its own farms supply rabbit-derived materials and embryonated eggs to pharmaceutical manufacturers. In 2021 it bought VPI, a producer of embryonated eggs for that market.

How livestock-genetics companies present themselves.

Livestock-genetics companies sell something a customer cannot see: the breeding value carried in an animal, a fertile egg or a frozen straw of semen. Their marketing therefore leans on the animals themselves. A prize bull or a breeding sow is photographed side-on, square to the camera, against a barn wall or an open sky, so that frame, legs and topline read clearly; the pose echoes the show ring and the sire catalogue.

Poultry breeders work at a different scale. Their pictures tend to show a day-old chick held in gloved hands, rows of laying hens in clean housing, or a single bird against a plain backdrop, with the brand name and line number set beside it. The gloves signal hygiene, and with breeding farms closed to casual visitors, staged photography often stands in for a site visit.

The laboratory is the third setting. Cattle and pig genetics companies show technicians filling or sorting semen straws, opening liquid-nitrogen tanks wrapped in vapour, or reading genomic data on a screen, to show that selection now runs on DNA testing as well as on pedigree and performance records. Alongside them come farmer portraits: a dairy farmer in the parlour, a pig producer in the barn, a family on the farm, used to make a technical product feel local.

Much of this imagery is made for trade shows. World Dairy Expo in Madison, Wisconsin, EuroTier in Hanover and the International Production & Processing Expo (IPPE) in Atlanta are where breeders put up stands, hand out sire catalogues and parade cattle in the ring. The companies in this guide are set out by what can be checked: who founded them, who owns them and what they breed.

A narrower group of “gastronomic” species.

Then the group narrowed. On 2 August 2017 Zootecnica International carried Groupe Grimaud’s announcement that it would transfer Hubbard to the Aviagen Group, which was to buy all of its shares; Grimaud said bird-flu outbreaks and the export bans that followed had hit international sales, especially in Asia and the Middle East. Poultry News reported on 4 August 2017 that the agreement had been signed on 31 July and that Hubbard would remain a separate company headquartered in France. Grimaud’s timeline places the handover in 2018. In 2021, the group says, it sold its layer division, Novogen and Verbeek, to EW Group; in 2023 it passed Filavie to Ceva and sold Choice Genetics, and Frédéric Grimaud left the chair of Valneva.

What remains is what the group calls the “gastronomic” species — Muscovy, Pekin and Mulard ducks, guinea fowl, pigeons and rabbits — under names such as Grimaud Frères, Galor, Europigeon and Hypharm, which since a 2017 merger with Eurolap has sold rabbit lines under the Hyplus and Hyla brands. In 2024, the company says, Grimaud Frères introduced Lunix, a system that sorts duck eggs by sex before hatching by recognising the eye colour of the embryo, without entering the egg. Newer ventures include Vital Meat, a cultivated-meat start-up founded in 2018, and Fly Genetics, a 2021 joint venture with Nasekomo that breeds black soldier flies. In 2022 the group became an entreprise à mission, a French company with a stated purpose written into its articles: “Prendre soin de la vie,” or “taking care of life.” In 2025, it says, it received the strategy trophy at the national Entreprise du Futur awards.

The group calls itself a family enterprise, and in 2017 described itself as primarily family-owned. It says it employs about 950 people of some twenty nationalities and sells in about a hundred countries through subsidiaries on four continents.

For a design guide, Grimaud shows how one breeder can speak for many smaller species at once, from ducks and guinea fowl to rabbits. Compare Aviagen, which took over Grimaud’s Hubbard business, and Hendrix Genetics, another breeder working across several species. For this guide we use a meadow green, a duck-egg blue and a warm straw with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Grimaud’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.