We definitely did not do it to save money. Analytical equipment is expensive. We've spent over half a million dollars on our lab so far. It will be a long time before we could even break even money-wise. Also, the consumables for our lab cost a ton each month; like solvents, buffers, testing standards, etc. It actually costs us more to run most of the testing in-house. Also, there is a misconception that because we built up a lab, that we don't use 3rd party labs anymore. That's far from the truth. We still spend between $5,000 and $10,000 per month in 3rd party testing. Alkemist Labs and Mérieux NutriSciences are the two main labs we use now, but we still also use Colmeric Analyticals and Analytical Labs for certain things. We don't have all the equipment necessary to be fully self sufficient yet, nor do we have all the expertise. We contract out to other labs for equipment we don't yet have, or methods we have not yet gotten the hang of.
There are a couple reasons we have been building up our analytical testing lab, and trying to bring things in-house. For one, flexibility and turn around time. 3rd party labs are very rigid in the way they operate, and often do not give out raw analytical data or testing methods. They consider those proprietary. We wanted to have more verification that methods were being done properly, and to understand the analytical chemistry behind it. This is why we have mostly moved to 3rd party labs that give us that data, and why we have tried to verify methods in-house on our equipment as much as we can. Also, we were getting 5-6 week turnaround times for testing for a while. That's too much time to be able to accept/reject incoming batches in an efficient manner, which was causing a lot of out of stock issues for us. Being able to verify things in-house a lot quicker has reduced that problem drastically. In addition, there are some methods that labs will not do, and compounds that labs will not test. Try getting Modafinil tested at a lab. It's insane! The prices are nuts, and you have to jump through hoops because of the scheduling. Now I can just walk into our lab, and run analysis on anything I want. Also, no labs were able to run chirality analysis on samples for us. They could not verify that L-theanine was actually enantiopure. So we went out and bought an Anton Paar polarmiter, and now we can test that. On top of all that, we just like to be as self-sufficient as we can. I don't trust a lot of people out there, and would rather be able to monitor my team handling these things. It's the same reason we do all our own design, printing, packaging, and fulfillment. We also have much larger plans for where we are taking the company, and an in-house lab is crucial to that plan.
So in-house testing is a big part of what we are doing, but it's not the sole testing we do. We still do a lot of 3rd party testing on many things. We are just trying to bring as much as we can in-house as time goes on. The flexibility and speed is invaluable, but it's also really cool to have the ability to run these tests and work with these machines. This is a passion of mine, just as much as it is a business, and sometimes I do things that might never be cost effective, but are rewarding personally. Do we need the new Thermo NIR we just bought? No, not really. However, it's going to be fun building up spectral databases of natural extracts, and using a new technology to quantify actives in the extracts. We'll still contract out for HP-TLC and HPLC of those extracts for the time being. However, it will allow us to build up our database while we do, and potentially be able to do that testing quicker in-house down the line. If nothing else, I can test the alcohol content of the homebrew I make on it. That's worth the $35K. Haha
I've uploaded the COAs for the batches used in your lots here: http://imgur.com/a/0I3UD
AlwaysLearning, can you PM me your Bitcoin wallet address? I am going to go ahead and refund you for your two orders, and you can use that money to send our samples to a lab of your choosing if you wish. My team is also pulling some jars from the shelf, and will be running them through the HPLC to verify.
Cheers!