Labs Find Love, Ahem, Leads Online

Making a Catch

Her blue eyes and smile or his rugged good looks are just the incentives he or she needs click open a profile.

Labs, too, find these lures: A food company seeks a lab to find cashew nut shells in a cashew butter product. Another processor needs pre-shipment inspection for imported foods, while another firm is asking for fat levels in the various cooking oils it presses.

Once a lab finds an enticing ad, it simply clicks the description link; but there’s a catch to making the catch. The laboratory must pay an annual fee of $1,500 to gain such access and remain on the site. If the lab has multiple facilities, it is $500 for each additional facility, although this negotiable, Murray is quick to point out.

“Sales people in labs realize that what they find here are real leads,” he says. “We’re talking to labs and companies that are sending us the work they don’t want.”

Murray explains that one particular laboratory in Massachusetts has facilities in France, Montreal and other part of the U.S.

“So if they answer a request out of Europe, we’ll pass along the information to their facility in France,” he adds. “More and more, we are getting labs worldwide. We almost always have a North American contact, but some of our labs are purely a Southeast Asian or a European lab and they are primarily seeking leads from only those areas.”

Labs in Love

The annual fees that labs pay allow firms to post a company profile, categorized by state or Canadian province and country. Laboratories can also post job openings, press releases, upcoming events as well as articles, case studies and tips.

One firm, Alliance Technologies LLC, a lab based in Monmouth Junction, N.J., offered tips on using contract services wisely, saying outsourcing partners are a means “to boost your productivity and capabilities without adding permanent capabilities.”

According to its posting, Alliance says finding the right outsourcing partner should bring rewards with a strategic alliance for bolstering business, while the wrong partner will slow progress.

A few simple questions can help lead a company to a laboratory that supplements its efforts to develop a product, maintain quality, understand the chemistry or accelerate expansion, the tip indicates:

1. Know what you need; ask the analytical or contract research lab if they have the instrumentation to meet your analysis or testing needs. Find out if your contractor has experience in the techniques, chemistries or materials you are working with.
2. Know what you’ll get; what kind of turnaround time is required for your project? Is their pricing competitive with the industry? Does your laboratory service provider abide by an ethics policy?

The Web site, Murray adds, also partners with companies that produce trade shows and professional organizations such as The Center for Professional Innovation and Education (Wayne, Pa.).

“I like the service,” says Dave Clarke, sales and marketing manager of JR Laboratories Inc. (Burnaby, British Colombia). “We wanted to enroll in the service to get a little more publicity, but we did not expect to get immediate contractual wins, which was the biggest surprise.

JR Laboratories specializes in analytical chemistry services for biotech, food and natural health product sectors, and Clarke indicates that while many multinational, multi-million dollar food companies form in-house labs, a lot could be saved and liability reduced by outsourcing microbiology to an established, accredited lab.

“Our core focus is in four sectors,” he says. “Primary are the biotech and pharmaceutical sectors; second is the natural health product sector and third is food sciences, specifically relating to chemical analysis of drugs, chemicals, pesticides, herbicides and hormones. When there are requests for such tests from the food industry, we jump at that.”