Hach Brand Guidelines: An Ames Water-Test Maker of 1947, Loveland and Veralto

A chemist, a home-economics student and a test kit.

Hach began in Ames, Iowa, in 1947. According to the Science History Institute, Clifford Hach and Kathryn “Kitty” Hach met at Iowa State University and married in 1943; four years later they set up their own company, paid for with money Clifford had earned by selling a patent on a new way of generating carbon dioxide. English Wikipedia describes him as a chemist and inventor, and says the couple’s first commercial success was a simplified titration method for measuring the hardness of drinking water.

The two split the work. The Science History Institute says Clifford ran research and development while Kitty handled business operations, marketing and general management. She built the customer base through a direct-mail campaign aimed at municipal water plants, and, as a keen pilot, flew thousands of hours to take the analysis kits to remote towns and give training and on-site help. That mix of chemistry and plain-spoken selling became the company’s character.

The business started as a partnership. English Wikipedia says it was reincorporated in Delaware in 1968 as Hach Chemical Co., and both sources record that it went public the same year, selling a minority of its shares; most of the money, Wikipedia says, went into a new chemical plant in Ames. The name became Hach Company in 1980.

“Can be used by anyone who can read.”

Hach’s products were built around one idea: that water testing should not need a laboratory chemist. The Science History Institute says the company’s tests used visual comparison against colour standards and directions written for people without a technical background, and quotes the company motto that they could “be used by anyone who can read.” English Wikipedia gives the same line as the first of Clifford Hach’s ten criteria for a new product.

By 1970, English Wikipedia says, Hach made a line of instruments for finding specific impurities in water, a manometric apparatus for measuring the biochemical oxygen demand of sewage and industrial waste, and more than 100 portable test kits for laboratory and field use, each usually holding chemical reagents in small powder packets. The Science History Institute credits the company with helping to standardise water-quality tests and with pioneering titration test kits. Hach gathered its simplified procedures into the Water Analysis Handbook, which its website still lists as a resource today.

Later products kept the same logic of pre-measured chemistry. In 2007, English Wikipedia says, Hach introduced TNTplus, vials holding a measured reagent in which the sample reacts and is read in a closed container; particle counters followed the next year. The current Hach website groups its range into chemistries and reagents, online sensors, controllers and analysers, and laboratory and portable instruments such as spectrophotometers, turbidimeters and colorimeters.

Recognition went to the founders. In 2003 Kitty Hach-Darrow received the Pittcon Heritage Award, given jointly by the Pittsburgh Conference and the Chemical Heritage Foundation (now the Science History Institute), for her role as co-founder and chief executive of Hach Company and as the architect of its business model. The institute also notes that she was the first woman director of the American Water Works Association, and that in 1982 the couple set up the Hach Scientific Foundation to support science education.

Design and documentation.

Laboratory instrument makers tend to present themselves through the laboratory itself. Their pictures are usually of benchtop instruments in bright white rooms: chromatographs, spectrometers and titrators lined up on long benches, with sample trays loaded and a screen beside each one showing a chromatogram’s peaks or the curve of a spectrum. The instrument is often shown with its door open or a vial in a gloved hand, so that the scale of the work is clear.

People appear in a familiar costume. Scientists in white coats, safety glasses and nitrile gloves lean over a pipette, check a result on a monitor or load a rack of samples, and the setting is usually a clean, well-lit room rather than a factory floor. Lab automation brings its own imagery: pipetting robots moving across a deck of microplates, grippers lifting a plate from one station to the next, and close-ups of tips, tubes and wells.

The same settings recur across the category: product photographs on plain white or pale grey backgrounds, cut-away diagrams of an instrument’s inner path, and data shown as it would appear on the screen — a set of peaks, a spectral curve, a titration curve or a grid of wells coloured by result. In this kind of picture the instrument, the sample and the data carry the message, and a maker’s name usually appears as a badge on the casing or a logo in the corner.

Trade fairs remain central to how the industry shows itself. Exhibitions such as analytica in Munich, Pittcon in the United States and ACHEMA in Frankfurt bring instrument makers together on large stands, where new instruments are launched and demonstrated. The guides that follow look at what can be checked about each maker — who founded it, who owns it and how its name has changed — and keep the company’s own claims separate from what independent sources record.

From a family partnership to Veralto.

The company moved west as it grew. Its instrument division and headquarters went to Loveland, Colorado, in 1977 according to the Science History Institute, and in 1978 according to English Wikipedia. Wikipedia says instruments are still made in Loveland, where the company also has research and engineering and a technical training centre, while reagents and test kits are made and packed in Ames.

Ownership changed at the end of the century. In 1998 Hach bought Environmental Test Systems of Elkhart, Indiana, a maker of test strips, English Wikipedia says, and in 1999 the company was sold to Danaher Corporation, as both the Science History Institute and Wikipedia record. Under Danaher, Hach was joined with the German maker Dr. Bruno Lange GmbH; Wikipedia dates the Lange purchase to 1999, while Hach’s own website says the two “united” in 2004. English Wikipedia lists Hach Lange among the company’s family brands. Wikipedia lists later purchases including OPS Systems in 2009 and the Irish carbon-analyser maker Biotector in 2014.

On 30 September 2023 Danaher completed the separation of its Environmental & Applied Solutions segment as Veralto Corporation, according to Danaher’s press release of that day; Veralto shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on 2 October 2023. Hach is now part of Veralto, which issues its press releases from Waltham, Massachusetts; Hach’s website describes the brand as part of Veralto’s water-quality segment. Hach’s own website still opens its history with “our founders Clifford and Kitty Hach” and the aim “to simplify water analysis.”

For a design guide, Hach shows how a technical brand can be built on plain instructions and repeatable kits rather than on spectacle. Compare Metrohm, another name in titration, and Mettler-Toledo, a laboratory instrument maker with its own long history. For this guide we use a water blue, a deep navy and a teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Hach’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.