How QBench Powers Light Labs to Fix the Food Industry

It doesn’t take long to sift through a newspaper (or, more likely, scroll) to find that today’s food crisis is more prominent than ever. 

Heavy metals, microplastics, pesticides, phthalates, herbicides, mycotoxins, and countless other harmful substances have become common across food categories.

Yet they're invisible to our senses in every bite, sip, and snack.

This has a real consequence for public health. A 2024 study shows that the consumption of foods contaminated with heavy metals can lead to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. At the same time, critical nutrients have steadily declined in the foods we depend on most – even when choosing whole foods like fruit and vegetables.

Light Labs is on a mission to find out why – and be part of the solution. 

Light Labs is a modern testing lab and software platform designed to give food brands clear, reliable, and actionable insights into their products’ purity and nutritional integrity. To achieve this mission, the Light Labs team needed software that empowered them and gave them the flexibility they needed to automate key processes and share results with clients.

The Search for a Modern and Flexible LIMS up for the Job

We spoke with Jonah from the Light Labs team to better understand his journey for a LIMS up for the monumental task ahead of his team.

Jonah needed a modern, ultra-fast, and highly flexible LIMS. Not only did Light Labs have an intensive battery of tests to run, but they also needed to provide a customer-facing portal to relay test results and provide self-serve access to the data they collected. Doing so required a flexible LIMS with developer access to support custom integrations and automations. That meant a developer-friendly, RESTful API alongside an intuitive and configurable interface. 

Fortunately, that’s exactly what QBench provides.

But they needed more than a powerful LIMS; they needed to hit the ground running quickly. 

With an ambitious mission, there was no time to waste with a three-month onboarding process and extra time writing custom code for configuration and integrations. Fortunately, QBench’s product flexibility, deep configurability, and efficient onboarding process were a breeze, allowing them to get acclimated to the platform and set up their processes and integrations quickly.

“Onboarding with QBench was great. We had everything up and running quickly for processing tests and samples, and then we have been iterating from there. We started with a simple setup and have been able to scale QBench alongside us as our processes have grown more complex.”

Jonah, Founding Engineer at Light Labs

The combination of Light Labs’ dedication to the project and QBench’s ease of configuration enabled the project to go from kickoff to a system ready to process samples in about 40 days! A Time To Value (TTV) that is virtually unheard of in the LIMS industry.

Nowadays, Light Labs is well on its way to helping brands develop and ship healthier, more nutritious food products across the country.

See the Power of QBench LIMS For Yourself

Is your lab accomplishing life-changing work while struggling through the constraints of its tools and software?

Have you been frustrated by rigid legacy LIMS that require advanced IT resources or development work to modify to your changing workflows?

If you want a LIMS that is flexible enough to scale with you while empowering your team to get more done, we recommend checking out QBench. 

Click the button below to schedule a free demo to discover how QBench can accelerate your lab’s work—so you, too, can focus on what matters most.