By Rebecca Smith

As most of you know, Pickering Labs is a small company.  We all work on a single shift, so pretty much everyone is in the lunch room at the same time each day.  That makes for a wide range of conversational topics daily, which are often influenced by the San Jose Mercury newspaper on the table or the contents of the local news the evening before. 

When Utah passed their “Free-Range Parenting” law, it made national news back in March.  It also made conversation in the Pickering breakroom!  We discussed the definition provided for free-range parenting and concluded that here at Pickering we needed more options for defining parenting styles.  Enter the new supplemental phrases: cage-free parenting and pasture-raised parenting!  Taken from the Humane Farm Animal Care Standards, we decided that a cage-free child was the most closely supervised, followed by a free-range child (allowed some autonomy) and finally a pasture-raised child, which was given the most license to roam.  It’s interesting that although most of us considered ourselves to have been pasture-raised in our childhoods, many of the staff employed a more cage-free or free-range style when raising their own children. 

As Saji, Anita and Gabriela discussed the pros and cons of degrees of parental supervision (while giving David plenty of advice for raising his 15-month old daughter), I wondered what impact the ‘parenting’ differences had on the hens and their eggs…  It was lunchtime after all! 

It appears that pasture-raised eggs might have health benefits over commercially-raised eggs, including increased omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin E, vitamin A, and beta carotene.  They also have reduced cholesterol and saturated fats, both of which the American Heart Association recommends reducing in your diet to lower your risk of heart disease and stroke.  The differences in the eggs come from the chickens’ diet: pasture-raised hens eat grass and bugs in addition to the grain feed given to commercially-raised hens.

So, while we’re talking about the chickens’ diet and lifestyle, what else can contribute to the health and wellbeing of these hens?  After additional research, I discovered that poultry farming comes with its own bill of rights!  Called the Five Freedoms for Poultry, chickens are raised humanely when their basic needs are met (food, water, safety) but they are also given the freedom to express their natural behaviors and they have rapid access to diagnosis and treatment of injury or disease. 

Now I’m onto something!  But does a happier chicken make a tastier egg, or just a healthier one?  It’s hard to find scientific studies on taste, although you can find loads of data on the differences in composition of meats raised in different ways.  Composition impacts how healthy the egg is, but when it comes to its actual taste, apparently the mindset of the person tasting and the color of the egg might have more bearing on perceived taste than anything else, including whether the hen was pasture-raised or conventionally-raised. 

Even if taste isn’t a factor, purchasing healthier eggs and meat coming from happier hens can still be a worthwhile grocery shopping practice!  Top concerns include the environmental and human health effects of antibiotics use in the production of food, a topic that has gained steam in consumer awareness in more recent years and has been studied for several decades internationally.  As the public increases its attention on antibiotics use and antimicrobial resistance, farmers are beginning to make changes to the manner in which antibiotics are used in livestock farming.  And for good reason, as their livelihood could face increased pressure from the eventual market introduction of synthetic or lab-grown meats! 

In response to consumer concerns regarding food production, moving away from antibiotics use became a top priority for Perdue Foods, one of the biggest poultry producers in the United States.  Perdue began the process of raising poultry without antibiotics fifteen years ago, and they have hit a major milestone with 100% of the birds they produced in 2017 raised “No Antibiotics Ever,” meaning that from hatchery through slaughter, the birds are never treated with any antibiotics during their lifetime.  If the use of antibiotics become medically necessary for a bird, the animal is treated as needed but removed from Perdue Foods branded production.  All human and animal antibiotics have been removed from the feed and hatchery, and animals are raised in a way that does not require antibiotics for disease prevention. 

In fact, remember the Five Freedoms of Poultry?  Perdue continues to improve their implementation of the Animal Care Initiative, adding windows and enrichments to encourage bird activity.  Says Mike Leventini, manager of live production activities at Perdue Foods: “We believe an active chicken is a healthy chicken, it simply goes hand in hand.”  An impressive philosophy to implement for a company that processes 13 million birds per week from over 2,100 farms around the United States! 

Did you know Pickering Labs services the animal feed industry?!  We offer post-column methodology, instruments and consumables for the analysis of polyether antibiotics in animal feeds as well as the analysis of aminoglycoside antibiotics in feeds and the analysis of sugars in feeds.  We are also continuously improving our amino acids analysis in feeds and offer a wide range of post-column methods for oxidized and unoxidized feed samples. 

Most recently, our R&D team released a fast and sensitive method for the analysis of fumonisins in grains and feeds, which is particularly of interest due to the health problems caused in horses and swine.  You might remember our contaminated feed concerns from a previous newsletter article which discussed the risks of mycotoxins to livestock. 

By Judy Pickering

Four years into our 40-year marriage, I can recall Michael saying “I know I can improve amino acid analysis” with such enthusiasm it could only mean big things.  He’d finished up his second post-doc and was working in industry – a startling contrast, to be sure, but moving every year was increasingly difficult with our growing family.  So, we settled in the Bay Area permanently and he started first with Durham Instruments and then worked for Spectra Physics.  At the time, amino acid analysis was taking chemists on the order of 12 hours per run!  Reducing the run time to three hours was only the first of many developments Michael had up his sleeve. 

Within the year, Michael left his job to start Pickering Laboratories with our flagship product: Trione®, our ninhydrin reagent.  The first bottles were sent out to industry experts for evaluation, and became our ambassadors carrying with them our hope of building a successful business.  I remember it was important to Michael for the bottles of Trione® to ship upright, because he thought of them as little soldiers marching off to the marketplace to do the job of defending his reputation and building our brand.

The early days of the business were challenging.  Michael did all the phases of production, taking orders as well as all of the manufacturing, packaging and shipping.  He even “hired” our two older kids to wash the bottles sometimes.  I was working in corporate marketing at the time, so I would attend trade shows and help Michael network with potential customers.  We didn’t want people to know we were such a small company, so I used my maiden name to give the appearance I was an employee instead of his wife!

When Michael would talk to chemists about Trione®, they would get so excited about this breakthrough reagent for amino acids analysis.  We were always grateful so many people offered their advice and counsel just to help the enterprise along.  It was rough-and-tumble for the first year or two, and every encouraging word helped keep us going.

Customer orders began building momentum, and Michael and I breathed a sigh of relief!  Michael hired an additional 3-4 people on staff and I quit my job to help with administrative duties and expanding our marketing efforts.  He determined there was demand for a post-column derivatization instrument, and the PCX5000 was born.  Our earliest foray into instrumentation came as a benchtop kit, with standalone components including a pump, mixing system and reactor. Michael initially didn’t want Pickering Labs to be an instrument company, but we found that the instruments were needed to support the sale of our Trione® reagent and also the growing family of buffers we were selling.

Michael’s reputation for post-column expertise began gaining attention from other chemists whose applications were post-column but not amino acid analysis.  As a result, Michael began to explore these other industries’ post-column needs.  And when he developed Pickering’s OPA-reagent-based products for analysis of Carbamates and Glyphosate, he entered into the world of environmental testing and began working with EPA methods.  Chemists who had previously been making their own eluents by following the EPA methods could now buy Michael’s ready-to-use buffers and purified reagents instead.  And they kept reordering because of the quality and reproducibility that Michael’s chemistry delivered. He would even say that he would “guarantee the chromatogram” to any chemist using his products, which was unprecedented. 

With the administrative/office duties securely staffed and the business looking more and more like a successful enterprise, I stepped back into a part-time role and focused on marketing.  As our family expanded, my time also became more occupied at home (our two youngest daughters were born in the mid-80’s).  By the end of the eighties, Michael was ready to hire additional staff to manage the business so he could really focus on his true passion: research and product development. 

In fact, as I think about that time, the early nineties are when the company really started to take shape in its modern form.  Michael added then-Operations-Manager Jim Murphy to manage the business in 1991 (Jim is our current President) and shifted fully into a technical role.  They also hired a full-time marketing manager, and so I went to work soon thereafter for the Palo Alto school district. 

Michael and his team evolved the PCX5000 standalone kit into the PCX3100 and PCX5100, our first fully-integrated post-column derivatization instruments.  Michael also developed more post-column applications with the collaboration of EPA, FDA, AOAC and CDFA, all of which further expanded our chemistries and columns offered.  Which in turn cemented our customer base and reputation for making the post-column instruments.  The business experienced steady growth, and the PCX3100 and PCX5100 sold well and supported our chemistry sales exactly as we’d envisioned.

Pickering Labs celebrating its 35th anniversary is a wonderful chance for me to reflect on working so closely with Michael during the first ten years of the business.  And I’d like to use our newsletter as an opportunity to introduce myself, or reintroduce myself to our long-time customers.  After my retirement from the school district, I began getting involved in the business again and joined the Board of Directors in 2014.  My work with the Pickering team behind the scenes isn’t very visibile to our customers, but I hope this gives us an opportunity to remember Michael together and that you enjoy my fond recollections (and new perspective?) of how Pickering Labs began.

Thank you for being our customer and we hope you enjoy these fantastic photos. Our employees had a lot of fun digging through their old scrapbooks to help create this blast from the past!