Eurofins Acquires the House of Lancaster

Eurofins Scientific was founded in 1987 with 10 employees

to market the SNIF-NMR technology.

A patented analytical method used to verify the origin and purity of several types of food and beverages, including wine, and to identify sophisticated fraud not detectable by other methods.

Today the Eurofins Group is a leading provider of analytical services with: an international network of 150 laboratories across 30 countries in Europe, the USA, Asia and South America 9,500 staff a portfolio of 100,000 reliable analytical methods

more than 80 million assays performed each year to establish the safety, composition, authenticity, origin, traceability, identity and purity of biological substances

In April 2011, Eurofins acquired Lancaster Laboratories Inc from Thermo Fisher Scientific for $200 million. For the full year 2010, Lancaster generated revenues of US$ 115m, which implies 2010 proforma revenues for the combined group of close to US$ 1.1billion, with the food and pharmaceutical testing businesses each generating roughly 40%, and the remainder from environmental testing activities.

Dr. Gilles Martin, Eurofins CEO and founder, said “I am extremely pleased that Lancaster has now officially joined the Eurofins global network of laboratories. As the leading provider of pharmaceutical product testing services and GMP Quality Control (QC) in North America, Lancaster enables Eurofins to establish itself as the global reference in this stable pharmaceutical services segment. Moreover, as one of the leading providers of environmental testing services in the USA, and especially among Fortune 500 clients, Lancaster strengthens Eurofins’ franchise in providing high quality services to large global corporations. This bolt-on acquisition reinforces the Group’s leadership in terms of scale and quality of service on a wide range of laboratory activities worldwide.”

Turning now to Eurofins’ activities in Ireland, Padraig Larkin, operations director, says “Eurofins was set up here in Dundalk in 2001, so this year is our 10th Anniversary. This latest acquisition has been a massive move for the operations in Ireland. Prior to this, we had our operation here in Dundalk together with a laboratory in Belfast that operates basically as a public sector analytical laboratory serving local authorities. Now, we have a massive step upwards with Lancaster’s laboratory in Dungarven, near Cork ideally placed to serve the large pharmaceutical companies in that area. Here in Dundalk we specialise in food microbiology, food chemistry and environmental water testing. For example a couple of years ago, we had a scare here in Ireland with pig food being contaminated with dioxins, a problem in which we were very much involved. We are also involved in testing for such problems as E.coli and Salmonella. The overall result has been to lift us from 20 employees to around 100 here in Ireland.”

As an example of the excellent work done by Eurofins, in January 2011, The International Dairy Federation (IDF) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) announced a new test standard for the detection of melamine and cyanuric acid content in liquid milk, powdered milk products and infant formulae. These guidelines are consistent with those already used in Eurofins’ Competence Centres for Contaminants since 2008. Eurofins is the first and only testing service provider that has established guidelines and methods consistent with the IDF and ISO standard on a global basis.

Following the melamine in milk crisis that affected thousands of babies and the subsequent recall of milk and dairy products in China in 2008, Eurofins had developed and implemented the LC-MS/MS method (liquid chromatography combined with double mass spectrometry) for the analysis of infant food and dairy products. The analysis detects the presence of melamine in the ppb range, and is much more sensitive than the original GC method (gas chromatography combined with mass spectrometry).

For further information please telephone 00353 429 328 333 or visit www.eurofins.com