At Laboratory Supply Network, we’re all about helping you – the scientist – make better, more confident purchasing decisions more easily. A significant amount of that aim requires enabling you to make more informed decisions. As a supplier of laboratory equipment, we get asked all the time where various brands of equipment or individual items are made. That’s a legitimate question and it’s information that you deserve to know.
We can say from experience that often (but not always) there is a difference in build quality and reliability between equipment made in places known for high quality manufacturing and places known more for low-cost manufacturing. Furthermore, it’s not always easy to tell where something is made. Equipment sold by a US company or a company with US offices, for instance, certainly does not guarantee that it was made here in the United States, and companies are rarely straightforward with this information unless you contact them and ask them directly.
We realize that you shouldn’t have to contact a bunch of different suppliers to find out where your products are made. In fact, you shouldn’t have to contact anyone. That information should be made plainly available to you. … And that’s exactly what we’ve done.
We’ve compiled the country of origin for every non-accessory* product that we sell on our marketplaces and listed them plainly just below the name and manufacturer on the product page.
Now you can know exactly where your lab equipment is coming from without ever having to ask.
*You may be thinking: “Why not accessories as well?” There’s two reasons. One, the country of manufacture for an accessory is almost always the same as the country of manufacture of the main product. Secondly, this info is not easy to hunt down and keep updated. Most manufacturers do not publish this information, and some don’t even compile this information for internal use. It’s not trivial to compile all this info, and we’re not a big organization, so we figured it would better to take this more manageable step now and revisit in the future when we have more resources to dedicate to it. Likewise, because country of origin is not information that all manufacturers normally provide, it is possible for some of our country of origin information to be out of date and for us not to know it. We do our best to make sure this doesn’t happen, but if you find anything that’s incorrect, please let us know!