Exclusive Distributor of Stable Micro System's Texture Analyzers in North America
About: Competitors
At Texture Technologies, it is important to us that our customers get the right product for their testing needs. To that end, we do our best to understand the specific challenge or set of challenges you face before making recommendations. Meanwhile, we are often asked how Stable Micro Systems products stack up to the competition so here are answers to these frequently asked questions.
Q: How does Texture Technologies compare to other companies that distribute texture-testing equipment? Instron, for example?
A: Instron makes an array of instrumentation designed for testing products such as airplane landing gear, car frames, steel beams, plywood sheets and asphalt. Instron is now a big firm that keeps growing as the company purchases smaller competitors. Instron's business has expanded into many broad testing areas but a common theme among all divisions is that clients can measure their products with industry standard methods. Unfortunately, those industries that do not have common products or standards organizations are generally outside of the Instron's field of view. Instron's business team structure work perfectly for their own purposes, but it completely separates sales from applications support from software support from technical support, etc. Instron also has a large - and highly profitable - service business, a fact that sometimes surprises customers. The last year Instron was public they had $30 million in service revenue; 16% of their total revenue. Its $10.5 million in service profit was almost equal to its $11.5 million corporate net income. Instron's business model is built on service at what could be considered a high ongoing cost to you. Instron's probes and fixtures are also extremely expensive and often require other components (eg. support bases) that substantially increase the total cost to the end user and are barriers to after-market purchases of additional fixtures.
Texture Technologies' business, unlike Instron's, is texture measurement with a narrow range of instruments; we have established ourselves with a customer-service based business model that aligns our interests with those of our clients. As the exclusive North American distributor of SMS equipment (renowned for its reliability and longevity) we don't focus on service as part of our revenue stream. Our mission is to sell quality equipment and to treat every call as an opportunity to assist you.
Q: How does Texture Technologies gel-testing equipment compare to LFRA?
A: Overall, LFRA tends to generate lower bloom values for gel than the TA.XT2 or TA.XTPlus LFRA's display is only +/- 1g increments and thus not as sensitive. LFRA's trigger force is not easily user-calibrate-able and tends to drifts over time; the trigger force has the same sensitivity as the display and thus cannot as precisely trigger at the gel's surface. To calibrate away its drift the LFRA trigger requires removing the hood over the mechanism and adjusting a set of analog pots on the main printed circuit board, and while the probe descends, selecting the exact point at which the probe speeds up. It's tricky, requires skill and judgment and we found that very few operators calibrate the trigger force well. LFRA updates its display at only 6 times a second (often missing the real peak or the real final force), and its top heavy design causes it to vibrate when a user presses the start button, which also affects the triggering event. On soft gels, the differences are small and sometimes inconsequential. On firmer gels, the differences are substantial and frequently 15 to 20 bloom numbers.
Q: How does the Stable Micro Systems Powder Flow Analyzer compare to Freeman's powder flow analysis and rheology equipment?
A: Interestingly, an entity that Stable Micro Systems owns and Freeman share the same patented technology for powder flow analysis. An important difference in how we executed our product is that our Powder Flow Analyzer measures force instead of torque. At the same time, because the TA.XTPlus is such a versatile texture analyzer, our instrument provides much more flexibility testing powders above and beyond just how powders flow. Also, Texture Technologies offers the Powder Flow Analyzer as an accessory to our world class texture analyzer and software so it is priced significantly lower than the Freeman instrument.
Q: What is different about Texture Technologies food texture analysis instruments compared to those that Food Technology Corporation offers?
A: Food Technology Corporation's history is based on supplying quality control instruments to the agricultural industry for produce such as tomatoes. FTC still maintains this industry and QC focus in their product line while Texture Technologies and the family of Stable Micro Systems texture analyzers offers greater breadth in terms of fully-featured food texture analysis. With the wide array of food probes and fixtures in our catalog as well as our ability to rapidly develop custom probes and fixtures, the TA.XTPlus, TA.HDPlus, and TA.XTExpress offer greater versatility and flexibility. Also, our Exponent software provides users with much more control over how users conduct either their QC or R&D testing missions.