Hendrix Genetics Brand Guidelines: Boxmeer Layers, Hybrid Turkeys & Hypor Pigs

A layer breeder that went shopping.

Hendrix Genetics was formed in 2005 in Boxmeer, in the Netherlands, but its founder had been in poultry breeding for years before that. The company itself traces its origins further back, to 1923, when it says the Saazehof farm was founded in the Netherlands as a family enterprise. The sources read for this guide do not describe the farm under the German occupation of 1940–45.

The documented story begins in 1991. According to Canadian Poultry Magazine, writing in April 2009, Thijs Hendrix formed Hendrix Poultry Breeders that year by buying the poultry-breeding assets of Hypeco. The business became part of the Dutch feed group Nutreco in 1998, bringing in the Hisex brand, and in 2000 acquired the breeding stock and name of Dekalb Poultry Research in the United States. When Nutreco left layer breeding, the magazine says, the company Hendrix Genetics b.v. was created in 2005 to acquire the Hendrix Poultry Breeders assets from Nutreco.

In the same year Hendrix Genetics bought the French layer breeder ISA, the Institut de Sélection Animale. The Poultry Site reported on 15 December 2005 that Hendrix Genetics and the investment company Natexis Industrie had signed a definitive agreement for Hendrix to acquire Compagnie Internationale de Volailles, ISA’s owner, following a letter of intent announced on 22 September. Hendrix Poultry Breeders and ISA were to be owned side by side as the group’s egg-layer breeding division. Thijs Hendrix was named president and Antoon van den Berg chief executive, while Alain Audubert, who founded ISA in 1976 and led a buy-out of it in 2003, became honorary chairman. The report said equity came 80 per cent from the Hendrix family and management and 20 per cent from Natexis Industrie.

Two years later the group moved beyond eggs. On 25 January 2007 The Poultry Site reported that Nutreco and Hendrix Genetics had signed a memorandum of understanding for Hendrix to buy Euribrid, Nutreco’s animal-breeding business, then also based in Boxmeer. Euribrid comprised three breeding companies, Hybro for broilers, Hybrid for turkeys and Hypor for pigs, plus a trading company, Plumex, and an animal-breeding research centre. Hendrix Genetics says Hybrid Turkeys joined it in 2007, and Canadian Poultry Magazine later reported that it had bought the Hybro, Hypor and Hybrid Turkeys businesses.

Layers, turkeys, pigs and fish.

Not every brand stayed. Dutch Wikipedia, citing a Cobb-Vantress announcement, says Hybro was sold to Cobb-Vantress on 3 July 2008, with Hendrix Genetics receiving preference shares in the American broiler breeder. Canadian Poultry Magazine described the deal in 2009 as a strategic alliance that gave Hendrix a marketing arrangement and a place in the meat-chicken field.

Laying hens remain the core. Hendrix Genetics lists six layer brands: Babcock, Bovans, Dekalb and Hisex, along with ISA and Shaver, offered for white and brown egg markets and, the company says, for different climates and housing systems. Canadian Poultry Magazine reported in 2009 that Thijs Hendrix kept photographs of the founders of the brands he controlled in his office, and that visitors to the Boxmeer conference room were greeted with their national flag and anthem.

In turkeys the brand is Hybrid Turkeys, which the 2009 article placed in Kitchener, Ontario; Hendrix Genetics also lists a Traditional Turkeys range. In pigs, the Hypor business was later combined with Danish Genetics. On 17 September 2026 Hendrix Genetics announced that it had taken full ownership of Hendrix Genetics Swine, formed through a joint venture with its Danish partners nearly two years earlier, and that the unit would continue as the company’s Swine Business Unit. The release named Nexus 100 as the first product developed after the merger and Dennis Jørgensen as managing director of the swine activities from 1 September 2026.

The group has also moved into aquaculture. The company says its portfolio covers turkeys, laying hens, traditional poultry, swine, salmon, trout and shrimp, and its brand list links to names including Troutlodge, Landcatch and Kona Bay, as well as Sasso. It says 16 genetic brands now sit under the Hendrix Genetics name.

How breeders show genetics.

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.

One parent name over sixteen brands.

Hendrix Genetics is a house of brands. Most of its names are older than the company that now owns them: ISA was founded in France in 1976, and the Hendrix layer business brought together brands that had been built up by separate breeders. The company says that with each organisation that joined, it has tried to keep the brand’s own history intact, and its website sends visitors on to each brand’s own site.

The company remains private. In 2007 The Poultry Site described Hendrix Genetics as majority-owned and controlled by Thijs Hendrix Beheer B.V.; today the company calls itself “family-run and owned,” with about 2,800 employees and operations in 25 countries, and names Thijs Hendrix as founder, president and honorary chairman. Its chief executive in 2026 is Richard Maatman, according to its September 2026 release. Its headquarters remain in Boxmeer, in the province of North Brabant.

Its message is short. The company’s motto is “Better breeding today, brighter life tomorrow,” and it states its mission as addressing “the global food challenge with high quality animal genetics.” Those are its own words; the documented record is the sequence of deals, from the 1991 purchase of Hypeco’s poultry assets to the ISA and Euribrid acquisitions and the 2026 move to full ownership of its swine unit.

For a design guide, Hendrix Genetics shows how one parent name can sit above many older brands without replacing them. Compare Lohmann Breeders, another layer breeder, and Topigs Norsvin, a Dutch-based pig-genetics company. For this guide we use barn red, a feather brown and eggshell with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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