Columbia Laboratories | Portland, Oregon

Columbia Laboratories, a third-party analytical laboratory, specializes in analyzing products consumed or used by the public. This includes food products such as finished goods, pet foods, supplements, and raw ingredients, and environmental testing of soil and water quality.  

When Technical Manager Mike Roche arrived at Columbia, their team had begun using the ANKOM TDF Dietary Fiber Analyzer and the ANKOM 2000 Automated Fiber Analyzer. Having used classical methods for fiber determinations, the automated ease of ANKOM’s instruments impressed Roche regarding “not only the reproducibility of the data, but the engineering design and ease of maintenance.”  

Since then, Columbia has welcomed the ANKOM FLEX Analyte Extractor into its lab for use with fat-soluble vitamins and cholesterol analyses. The FLEX, alongside its sister ANKOM products, enabled the lab to transition away from standard bench chemistry techniques that required manual operation, were labor intensive, and produced a wider method uncertainty than desired.  

“With ANKOM’s products, we were able to reduce labor costs of the department... allowing me to pivot our staff to other areas of the laboratory, while simultaneously reducing method uncertainty for most analytes,” Roche explained. 

Roche continued on to express his satisfaction with the organization, technical expertise, friendliness and helpfulness of the ANKOM team. 

When asked what the deciding factor was in Columbia’s decision to purchase a FLEX, Roche shared, “Prior experience with their products... and work with them regarding Vitamin D and Cholesterol validations, provided the confidence needed to make the step. I have long desired a way to automate the sample preparation of fat-soluble vitamin analysis as this is often labor intensive and reserved for more experienced analysts, so to hear that ANKOM had created such a platform and was interested in working with us on the validations with little long term risk, the decision to move forward was a no brainer.”