98% of the world's soybean meal is used as animal feed, principally as a protein supplement. With the importance of protein in animal growth and development, knowing what's in your soybean meal is vitally important. There is more to protein than the crude protein concentration number, however. If an animal can't digest the protein, if it isn't a 'soluble' protein, then it doesn't actually provide the nutritional value needed. LECO's FP828 is capable of both total and soluble protein analyses.

Running and maintaining a full analytical laboratory can be more cost than a company can afford, but what other options are there for a small business looking for quality control and regulatory compliance? Independent testing and consulting laboratories groups such as the Tentamus Group, can fill that gap. One of its laboratories, bilacon, specializes in the safety of food, feed, food supplements, and cosmetics. 

In a recent interview with eFOOD-Lab International, Benjamin Ende, a state-certified food chemist with bilacon, talked about the benefits of LECO's TGA801 thermogravimetric analyzer in his lab's day-to-day operations.

So many factors go into the quality and characterization of plants and biomass, but many thermogravimetric analyses take so much time. Drying, ashing, and weighing multiple samples takes effort and care just to control for atmospheric effects, much less to actually get precise results that can then be used to analyze the quality and structure of the plants. LECO's TGA801 is an automated thermogravimetric analyzer designed to take the time out of the testing.

LECO announces the addition of hydrogen analysis capabilities to the 828 series, which will transform the way users determine carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen in a variety of petrochemical and other organic materials. The CHN828 maintains the core capabilities and performance of previous generations of LECO macro combustion instruments while possessing key improvements in throughput, uptime, and reliability. By incorporating state-of-the-art hardware and an on-board touch-screen software platform with rapid analysis times, the CHN828 operates at a low cost-per-analysis and allows users to easily handle the most demanding sample applications.

When the TruMac® Macro Determinator at the Southern African Grain Laboratory (SAGL) needed to be replaced, laboratory manager Jolanda Nortjé returned to LECO for an updated solution. For the past twenty years, LECO had been providing the SAGL with excellent service support, and their TruMac and previous nitrogen analyzers had been LECO products they were very satisfied with. At the end of 2019, trusting LECO again, the SAGL purchased a LECO FP928 to replace their TruMac.

How efficient is your workflow when it comes to food samples? Are you sure you're seeing everything your sample has to offer? Learn how LECO has been expanding what is possible when it comes to food safety analyses with a free series of webinars.

All of these webinars are now available as on-demand recordings on our website.

Why do you use the sample container that you use? Is it something you've ever thought about? Sample containers and crucibles are both wonderfully simple, to hold your sample without influencing the analysis, and wonderfully complex... to hold your sample without influencing the analysis.

But are you using the best container for your type of sample?

Determining the moisture content in cannabis and hemp is a critical factor in the growth and distribution of the process. Too much moisture can be indicative of microbial contamination, which can lead to health risks in the end user. It is also crucial to determine moisture content when extracting CBD oil. However, the plant nature of cannabis makes traditional loss-on-drying methods difficult, as the plant matter could be lost to thermal decomposition, resulting in falsely high moisture results.

Well-balanced crops require well-balanced soil. While carbon may be the most essential element for organic life, the right ratio of nitrogen and sulfur in the soil along with the carbon can really influence the speed and strength of plant development and growth. With a macro combustion carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur determinator such as LECO's CNS928, those ratios can be discovered easily through fast and precise analysis.

There’s coal and then there’s coal, and Santa Claus knows the difference. When preparing coal for the stockings of naughty boys and girls on Christmas Eve, Santa is not about to waste high quality, high-carbon material on children who have been bad. But while Santa is magic and can tell in an instant which coal is appropriate, how can those of us not lucky enough to work out of the North Pole determine our coal quality?