Grant Instruments Celebrates 60th Birthday

Grant Instruments has been celebrating its 60th birthday in recent weeks but is keen to use the occasion to look forward to the future rather than looking back.

Ludo Chapman, managing director of Grant Instruments - his father Cecil Chapman co-founded the company with Peter Ward back in 1952 - is determined to keep all eyes focused on the future.

He said: “It’s a remarkable achievement to have traded successfully for 60 years but it is not the time to look back now. We need to continue to leverage our unrivalled expertise in heating and cooling technology and temperature control to maintain our leadership position in the scientific instrumentation market.”

For the last six decades, Grant has been designing, manufacturing and distributing scientific products including water baths, block heaters and coolers, baths/circulators and re-circulating chillers, thermoshakers, rockers, rotators and shakers, centrifuges and vortex mixers.

Over this time, Grant has also developed a successful data acquisition business and more recently has diversified its offering by applying its scientific expertise to the development of sous vide cooking baths for the catering industry, a rapidly growing market that will play an important role for the company going forward.

“The market is changing rapidly and our over reliance on the UK and European markets has led us to look further east for our future growth and prosperity - we now have operations in Shanghai (China) and Bangalore (India) and will be looking to find further agile partners to grow our business in these regions in particular,” added Ludo Chapman.

Chapman continued, “Clearly, we have built a great reputation and that is testament to the hard work of our committed staff team but a new Grant is now emerging and the watchwords of this business will be quality, innovation, agility and customer focus!”

Grant Instruments began life making water baths for laboratories in a building at the bottom of the garden of the Old Vicarage in Grantchester, Cambridge, England, hence the company name.

Headquartered at Shepreth, Cambridgeshire, England, it now has operations in three continents and an extensive network of dealers and distributors servicing Europe, the Americas, and the Asia Pacific region.

“We have a great history and there have been some incredible successes over the last 60 years,” said Mr Chapman.

Mr Chapman continued, “However, we now need to refocus, use our exceptional expertise and market knowledge to continue to work with customers - as we did for the launch of our Optima water bath range earlier this year - so that we really understand the heating and cooling challenges of technicians and researchers in the modern laboratory. That’s the key to our success and survival!!”