History

Raymond Pavitt established Astoria-Pacific, Inc., in 1990. Its headquarters is located in Clackamas, Oregon (a suburb of Portland). Astoria-Pacific is the sole manufacturer of the Astoria and Astoria 2 continuous flow analyzers.

Astoria-Pacific started small, with a few offerings in the horticultural market. Its primary product was a liquid rooting concentrate, Dip’N Grow, for woody plant propagation.

The company later expanded into the automated chemistry and analyzer business by buying back the manufacturing rights of the RFA^TM 300, which Ray brought to market in the ’80s while at ALPKEM.

Astoria-Pacific’s Research and Development team updated the modules of the RFA and integrated them with our powerful FASPacII software platform, which gave rise to the Astoria and Astoria2 analyzers.

Today, Dip’N Grow and Astoria-Pacific have become successful individual entities, and Astoria-Pacific has grown significantly to offer a wide variety of automated wet chemistry analyzers for several markets.

Our goal is to provide our customers with the best products and support in the industry.

 

Our Founder: Raymond Pavitt

Ray Pavitt’s career and experiences stemmed from Technicon. He worked as a service engineer on autoanalyzers and Sequential Multiple Analyzer (SMA) units. Eventually he left and started his own consumable and reagent business to support these and other Technicon equipment –ALPKEM^TM in 1969.

However, those old analyzers used substantial amounts of sample and reagents during operation. Therefore, Ray and his partners at ALPKEM, decided to develop their own segmented flow analyzer. They proved that, by reducing the size of glassware and tubing sizes of the technology, they could both save a lab’s reagent costs as well as reduce the waste that was created–all the while doubling the speed of analysis! The name of this new analyzer was the RFA^TM 300 (Rapid Flow Analyzer), which was later complemented by the cost-effective RFA II. Both of these analyzers helped revolutionize the industry.

Pavitt and his partner sold ALPKEM in 1989 to a Swedish conglomerate. He soon left and started to formulate his plans for the next company … Astoria-Pacific.

NOTE: ALPKEM^TM and RFA^TM are Trademarks of OI Analytical