The early days of Eurofins – Starting-up

Today, the Eurofins Group is the global leader in Testing for Life, but it all started with one service offering back in 1987: wine authenticity testing. But how did the idea for Eurofins come about? Why was there a need for testing the authenticity of wine? And how did the company survive without external funding? Learn about our journey in the first part of a new series of articles on the early days of Eurofins.

In 1987, 23-year-old Gilles Martin was a recent graduate of an engineering school in France. His parents, Professors G. and M. Martin, and their research teams at the University of Nantes in France, had invented a ground-breaking technology called SNIF-NMR™ in the early ‘80s.

At the time, the chaptalisation of wine, whereby sugar is added to the fermentation process to increase the wine’s alcohol content, was a type of food fraud often so sophisticated that other testing methods could not detect it. SNIF-NMR™ (site-specific natural isotopic fractionation by nuclear magnetic resonance) offered a means of verifying the botanical, synthetic and even geographical origin of a product.

Gilles Martin realised the commercial potential of the SNIF-NMR™ concept. And so, he bought the rights to use and market SNIF-NMR™ from the University of Nantes and the French National Centre for Scientific Research. Then, he founded his first laboratory in Nantes to make the SNIF-NMR™ technology available to wine producers. With one entrepreneur and three employees, Eurofins was born.

With the rights to a niche technology, the question was, to what extent were people interested in wine testing? Gilles soon realised that the market for wine analysis was limited, and the wine authenticity testing service alone was not enough for Eurofins to break-even or make a profit.

Eurofins employees at the time began to research how SNIF-NMR™ analysis could be applied to other food and beverage products that may also be subject to fraud during production (often unbeknownst to producers and retailers) and added these methods to the Eurofins portfolio. Firstly, expanding into fruit juices and other non-alcoholic beverages, then natural flavours, spices, honey, and more. In doing so, Eurofins uncovered a need for specialised laboratory testing to support companies in ensuring their products were of the highest possible quality. As it turned out, authenticity testing was an extremely powerful tool to protect both brands and consumers from fraud.

The potential for Eurofins’ testing business was now clear, but this did not mean overnight growth. The pace of development was steady, so as to avoid the need for external funding from private equity or venture capital firms, which meant that Eurofins had to be profitable from the start. But as a single laboratory establishing itself on the market, there were periods of uncertainty, as with most start-ups.

Back then, samples would arrive to the Nantes laboratory through standard French post, and team members would eagerly check the mailbox each day to see what had arrived. Sometimes, it was barely enough to remain financially self-sufficient. For a couple of months, Eurofins did not reach its target number of samples, so the team had to be very patient and frugal.

Still, the team wanted to shape Eurofins’ destiny on their terms. This led to team members mastering multi-tasking, with Gilles Martin himself in charge of accounting, sales and business development, training, and more! Step by step, additional people were hired to take over some of these responsibilities, and Eurofins saw a gradual employee increase of up to 40% annually during the early years. By 1995, equipped with a larger team and a wealth of knowledge about the food testing market, Eurofins was ready to enter into a new phase of growth…

Read more in our new book, The Story of Eurofins.