Mesa Labs acquires North Bay Bioscience

January 25, 2016Featured Articles, Sporetesting BlogBy Mesa Labs

Lakewood, Colorado, August 6, 2015 – Mesa Laboratories, Inc. (NASDAQ:MLAB) (we, us, our, “Mesa” or the “Company”) today announced the acquisition of substantially all of the assets (other than cash and certain fixed assets) and certain liabilities of the dental sterilizer testing business of North Bay Bioscience, LLC, a Michigan company (“NBBS”).

The bulk of the NBBS business involves testing of small table-top sterilizers in the U.S. dental industry under CDC and State guidelines, which generally require that each sterilizer is tested weekly using biological indicators (“BI’s”). In practice, for each sterilizer that a dental practice may have, NBBS delivers a kit that contains sufficient BI’s for 52 weeks of testing. To conduct the test, the BI’s are processed through the sterilizer in the dental office and then mailed back to NBBS for testing to determine if the sterilizer was working correctly. NBBS has created a service unique in the sterilizer testing business which tracks the performance of each sterilizer and allows the dental practice to monitor this data on-line.

In addition to the testing business, NBBS distributes self-contained biological indicators to the dental market in both the U.S. and Canada for those dentists who prefer to perform the testing process in-house.

NBBS is based in Traverse City, Michigan, and we will continue to operate the business from the current facilities. Upon the closing of the transaction Mesa hired all of the NBBS employees, including the management team.

“We are excited about the acquisition of NBBS”, said John J. Sullivan, President and CEO of Mesa. “Mesa has long been a major supplier of BI’s to the dental testing market, but we have never provided a service directly to dentists, such as that conducted by NBBS. With this acquisition, we are now more directly involved with the users of our products, which allows us to capture additional margin for these products. A movement to selling directly to end users is a strategy common to several of our product lines and the acquisition of NBBS advances this effort. NBBS has been growing at an annual rate of approximately twelve percent over the past three years, and I look forward to working with our new Mesa employees as we work to continue to grow the business going forward.”

“It’s rare that such a joining of forces results in a collection of talents, resources and attributes that holds so much potential”, said Michael Kittendorf, Manager and Owner of NBBS. “We are certain that our customers will benefit from this direct to market movement and the combining of these two companies. We are very excited to be joining the Mesa Labs organization and we are looking forward to contributing to the growth and success that will come.”