SASSO wishes you a happy end of the year 2020

This health crisis has an extraordinary impact on our economy and society. It is forcing us to adapt, to rethink the way we work, communicate and live together. I sincerely hope that you are not personally affected and that your loved ones are doing well.

As early as March, at the beginning of the lockdown in Europe, our team looked for all possible solutions to carry on with supplying our colored parent stock to our customers and breed traditional, rustic chicken breeds adapted to outdoor rearing conditions. We also adapted by cancelling the Colors Your World Seminar scheduled in May 2020. We hope to be able to reschedule it as soon as conditions will allow it.

Thanks to our past experiences and our approach of compartmentalization related to Avian Influenza, our teams have accepted the implementation of new sanitary conditions in order to protect themselves from the risk pertaining to Covid19: isolation of tools and collaborators, staggered hiring and break schedules, mutual aid between departments (sales team not travelling and participating in production activities for example), continuation of our selection work, implementation of webinars and video conference appointments, etc.

The lack of logistical options severely limited our sales in April and May 2020, but our customers, have accepted these constraints and postponed your orders until the summer of 2020, despite the sharp increases in freight rates. Our employees continued to double their efforts in June and July in order to achieve an unprecedented breeding season, both in terms of volume and product diversity.

We thank you for your loyalty to SASSO and its traditional genetics, and for your encouragements which make us excited to continue this beautiful journey.

Today, Covid19 is still very much present in Europe and we also face other challenges such as Avian Influenza that is gradually spreading. But we are prepared for it. SASSO’s French facilities are sanitary compartments recognized by the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE): we are the one and only company that is 100% compartmentalized. By strengthening our control plans and sanitary measures, this compartment status allows us to continue our breeding, hatching and trading activities, even if there were outbreaks near our sites. Our veterinary and commercial teams improve every day to maintain this exceptional status and continue our distribution of chicks, the future breeders for the whole planet.

Thanks to our shareholder Hendrix Genetics, we also have other logistical solutions. Since 2019, we have invested and established GPs in Brazil and Canada, in the production tools of the Layers Business Unit of the Hendrix Genetics group. This way, we can distribute our breeders from the Americas to Asia and Africa.

We are looking forward to 2021, as we continue our breeding journey by developing new recurrent tests in France. We strengthen our processes and teams to be more agile in the future. We will carry on with the renovation of our hatchery in Le Mans, France, in order to better control the hatching of our parent stock. We hope that this year, 2021 will be a year of renewal that will allow us to imagine a more peaceful future.

The whole SASSO team wishes you a happy end of the year 2020!