Hybrid breeding has become an important pillar for a sustainable agriculture, especially in allogamous crops such as maize, sunflower and rye. Hybrids do not only show an increased productivity but also higher yield stability, especially under limiting environmental conditions. So far, extensive studies of the performance of hybrids derived from an autogamous species such as wheat have been limited. The potential benefits of hybrid cultivars led to an increased focus on hybrid wheat breeding in Germany. Two complementary large scale studies (HYWHEAT and ZUCHTWERT) have been conducted in the last 7 years evaluating in total 95 male lines, 520 female lines and about 5,000 hybrids in 12 different locations. We demonstrate that hybrid wheat achieves a constant midparent heterosis of about 9% for grain yield in all years with a maximum of 26%. Further, we show that even though grain yield and protein content display an antagonist effect, hybrid wheat can achieve the same bread making quality in comparison to line varieties but at higher grain yield, as well as good resistance against common diseases such as yellow rust, powdery mildew and fusarium head blight. The use of genomic and metabolomic data allowed us to detect additive and dominance effect quantitative trait loci for grain yield and protein content that display antagonistic pleiotropic effects, making genomic selection based on the index grain protein deviation a promising method to alleviate the negative correlation between these traits in wheat breeding. Throughout the projects important concepts and methods such as breeding schemes based on reciprocal recurrent genomic selection and optimization algorithms for the detection of heterotic patterns have been implemented and tested, demonstrating that hybrid breeding in wheat can support a sustainable agricultural production.