This is a guest post by a good friend of the blog who wishes to remain anonymous.

Several months ago I was approached by a franchise owner from one of North America’s largest fast food chains. He was perplexed as to why he was paying $35.00 for a role of Quat (quaternary ammonium chloride) test paper from which he was getting at best 14 tests while we were selling a comparable product for $12.00 that did 100 tests…1/20 the cost!

We sent him a pack of our strips to test, which he reported worked fine except that the readings were exactly double. We thought it might be a special Quat formulation for which we needed to recalibrate our strips. So, we got a sample of his Quat solution (which turned out to be a well known brand called Oasis 146) as well as an unopened dispenser of the test paper he was using. Our lab discovered that not only were our strips dead-on but the competitive strips were consistently reading only 50% of the true value for both the sample solution as well as three other commercially available brands.

Armed with this information, I contacted the purchasing agent at the fast food chain who handles this. I had assumed the potential savings would interest him. Initially incredulous, he asked for supporting data which I provided. I even supplied him with the names of labs in his area he could go to for independent testing.

Within weeks, I was blown off. It dawned on me that I had overlooked the obvious. The fast food chain demands that its franchisees buy all their supplies from them. Each franchisee has to spend over $1800/year on test strips whereas if they bought ours, it would be around $80.00. The competitive test papers cost only about $0.25 a roll to make but sell for $35Cdn. (That’s three markups before it gets to the franchisee). Multiply that by 3000 stores in Canada & you have over $5 million being spent compared to $250,000 for ours. Someone is making a lot of money! And, at a bare minimum this is 1/20th of the North American market. So, at least $100 million worth of test paper is being foisted on fast food franchisees compared to $5 million of equally good test strips.

Interestingly, the competition sells their product as a long roll in a plastic dispenser, like Scotch tape. The fast food workers tear off much longer strips than they need to, hence only about 14 tests rolls. Ours come with a small pad glued to a plastic strip.

Moreover, each franchise uses up 1 US gallon of solution per week at roughly $15.00Cdn per jug. Since they are using double the amount they really need, that adds another $400 per franchisee or $1.2 million for the entire Canadian chain or ~$25 million for the North American market. Aside from the expense it begs the question as to the environmental impact.

To top it all off, the local health authorities who instruct restaurant owners in proper sanitation may be unknowing dupes. I contacted one such office who told me they got their strips free & I should report this problem to the supplier. However, I pointed out that it seemed a bit odd that if neither the chemical company that makes the solution nor the company that makes the strips hadn’t done the QA already, why would they start now?

If I were a suspicious individual, I would suggest that the fast food chain owners are in collusion with the chemical supplier who is in bed with the test paper maker…