Light Labs

We're #hiring a new GTM Engineer, Agents in Austin, Texas Metropolitan Area. Apply today or share this post with your network.

We're #hiring a new Product Manager in Austin, Texas Metropolitan Area. Apply today or share this post with your network.

We're #hiring a new Growth Product Manager in Austin, Texas Metropolitan Area. Apply today or share this post with your network.

We're heading to Anaheim for our second year at Expo West (this week, March 4-6)! This time we're coming with a larger team. If you're a brand looking to increase revenue through transparency, or a manufacturer whose ready for faster testing turnarounds and real cost savings, please reach out. We'd love to connect! #ExpoWest2026 #NaturalProductsExpoWest #LightLabs

Here’s how Initiative Foods, one of the largest co-manufacturers in the baby food industry, modernized their testing workflows while reducing costs by 30%. 1️⃣ Accelerated turnaround times. Heavy metals results now come back in just 2–3 days with real-time tracking, freeing up inventory, speeding production cycles and cutting down on follow-ups. Initiative can test, get answers, and act within the same week. 2️⃣ Centralized results across brands. All results now live in 1 centralized system with secure, brand specific access. This saves time, reduces manual work and helps keep everyone on the same page. 3️⃣ Raised the bar on compliance and precision. Baby food is one of the most heavily regulated categories, especially with AB 899 rolling out. Initiative Foods now has sub-parts per billion detection for heavy metals (exceeding national standards) and audit-ready reports at their fingertips. Shoutout to Merisha Torrano, Cullen Ankenman and the Initiative Foods quality team for leading the charge on these improvements. The result: A faster, more efficient, and more transparent testing program that benefits every brand they manufacture for. Check out the full case study. Link in the comments👇

One of the coolest things about running a testing lab is seeing how hidden factors, like processing or packaging, impact what's really in food. A framework I love is the NOVA scale, which objectively measures food processing. Take an apple: • NOVA 1: Fresh apple • NOVA 2: Pure apple juice concentrate • NOVA 3: Canned applesauce • NOVA 4: Apple-flavored cereals or gummies It's intuitive that nutrients drop sharply by NOVA 4—but something less obvious (and equally concerning) happens too: phthalate contaminants rise dramatically. A study (Buckley et al., 2019) found people who regularly consumed ultra-processed foods had roughly 2x higher levels of phthalates (MCOP) in their urine compared to those eating minimally processed foods. Phthalates quietly enter through: • Plastic tubing (like PVC hoses in dairy) • Flexible plastic packaging • Vinyl gloves and conveyor belts These contaminants never appear on ingredient lists, yet obviously impact finished good purity. Processing clearly matters, and not just nutritionally. Love being able to help solve this at Light Labs, where we work with quality-focused brands and manufacturers to (a) improve their testing workflows and (b) tell an objective story about their products with lab data.

More and more brands are choosing to show—not just tell. We’re proud to partner with LesserEvil as they publish contaminant testing results directly on their product pages, powered by Light Labs. Fast turnaround, rigorous testing, and full transparency. In a space full of marketing claims, this is the new bar: verified, shareable data that consumers can actually see.

We’re proud to partner with Andrea Gomez and the team at David to help them move faster, innovate with confidence, and back every product with real testing. Let’s keep raising the bar on transparency.

Light Labs is live. We’ve quietly been building a new kind of lab — one designed to make testing a growth engine, not just a compliance checkbox. Today, we’re proud to support hundreds of food and supplement brands — including many of the fastest-growing names in baby food, supplements, snacks, and clean-label CPG — who want to back their claims with hard data, share that data with customers, and lead with trust. The food system is broken in ways we can’t see. Heavy metals in baby food. Microplastics in protein powder. Glyphosate in your water bottle. Even the healthiest foods today often lack the nutrients we assume are there. The problem isn’t just contamination — it’s invisibility. Most brands don’t have the data, tools, or infrastructure to know what’s actually in their products, let alone prove it. Consumers are asking harder questions. But testing remains slow, fragmented, and opaque. We built Light Labs to change that: to give brands a testing partner that works at their speed and speaks their language. Light Labs is a modern analytical lab and software platform built for today’s quality leaders: • 3-day turnaround for heavy metals • Testing for heavy metals, glyphosate, PFAS, BPA, microplastics, omega-3s, and more • Clear, actionable reporting internally and customer-facing • Support for regulatory frameworks like Prop 65, AB 899, and beyond But more importantly, we make transparency usable. Brands use Light Labs not just to stay safe, but to drive conversion, strengthen loyalty, and differentiate themselves in a crowded market. We believe every brand should be able to show — not just say — that their products are clean, safe, and nutrient-dense. This is our mission: Bring transparency to the food system.