Patrick Kaltenbach
President and Chief Executive Officer at Mettler-Toledo International
Thanks, Shawn. Let me make some comments on our operating businesses, starting with Lab, which had an outstanding growth of 35% in the quarter. Pipettes had excellent growth. all other major product categories also had robust sales growth and growth in all regions was very strong. Biopharma continues to be very favorable and continuing the trend we saw in the first quarter, we see strong customer demand in other segments such as chemical. We expect demand for our laboratory products to continue to be positive due to favorable biopharma trends, vaccine research, and bioproduction scale-up and production.
While we faced tougher comparisons in the second half of the year, we remain confident we can continue to capture share, given the strength of our product portfolio and continued execution of our Spinnaker sales and marketing initiatives. In terms of our industrial business, core industrial did very well in the quarter with a 27% increase in sales. All three regions of the world had robust core industrial growth. Improving market conditions, including some benefit from pent-up demand, combined with the strength and diversity of our product portfolio and our focus on attractive market segments contributed to the strong results. Similar to my comments on laboratory, we will face tougher comparisons for the second half of the year, but our outlook and our confidence in gaining market share remains positive for this business.
Product Inspection had increased momentum and solid sales growth of 9% in the quarter. We saw good growth in all regions. We expect good growth in product inspection for the remainder of the year as we are gaining better access to our customer facilities and believe we will benefit from some pent-up demand in the business. Food retailing grew 9% in the quarter. Let me make some additional comments by geography. Sales in Europe increased 23% in the quarter with excellent growth in lab, core industrial, and food retail. Americas increased 29% in the quarter with excellent growth in lab and core industrial. Product Inspection did well in the Americas, while food retail declined.
Finally, Asia and the rest of the world grew 28% in the quarter with outstanding growth in Laboratory and Industrial. As you hear from Shawn, China had another quarter of stellar growth. We would expect another good quarter of growth in Q3 in China, although not at the same level of the first half as China faces more challenging comparisons. We are strongly positioned in China, and the team is executing very well.
One final comment on the business. Service and consumables performed very well and were up 23% in the quarter. We are very happy with the growth in this important and profitable part of the business. That concludes my comments on the business.
With our better-than-expected sales growth in the first half, we are making incremental investments for future growth. These investments are centered on innovation and operational excellence. In product development, in our manufacturing facilities, and in our corporate programs such as Spinnaker sales and marketing.
Let me give you some recent examples, starting with product development, where we have a proven track record of launching market-leading technologies. It all stems from our deep knowledge of customer processes and what our solutions can do to enhance or improve these processes. We think of innovation in product development as customer-centric rather than technology-centric. We are focused on the specific value of our solutions can provide to customers, for example, in terms of productivity, compliance-related matters, safety, or data integrity.
On the website, we have recently launched our newest version of our LabX instrument control and data management software. This latest vision fully supports the lab digitalization, and with the strong adoption of our customer base, we have doubled the number of instruments that can be networked. LabX increases our customers' productivity by speeding up daily work through the management of data and development of workflows. It enhances security and compliance, ensuring data quality and full data traceability. Finally, LabX helps reduce complexity in asset managers data, assets and workflow centrally and seamlessly integrates into laboratory data management systems such as LIMS. Software is progressively becoming a deciding factor for customers in choosing a supplier for Benchtop lab solutions.
With the increasing importance of software, LabX is helping to position us as a trusted adviser for certain global pharma customers as we meet their demands for instruments, service, and software. While lab receives the greater share of R&D investments, we also have some great examples of new products on the industrial side, including a best-in-class industrial terminal, which provides fully integrated weighing applications for -- with the industry's fastest processing speed.
Similarly, we launched new load cell technology in our product inspection business, which provides industry-leading check weighing throughputs with maximum precision. Both of these products provide value by increasing customers' productivity. New products highlight our deep and great knowledge of our customers' processes and pain points and allow us to lead the market with technology to provide specific value to customers. We are also investing in our manufacturing facilities to boost productivity. Last quarter, we rolled out significant automation in our pipette and tip harvesting process, resulting in a meaningful increase in yield per molding machine.
This quarter, we are unveiling a new expanded clean room for our pipette manufacturing as well as inaugurating a new facility for our secondary brand, Biotix, that will expand our pipette and tip manufacturing capacity and efficiency. We are also launching a project for our Process Analytics business in the U.S. to optimize production and its warehouse layout, which will yield improvements in material flow, in productivity, and production capacity. We also continue to invest in innovation in our corporate programs. You have seen over many years for tremendous innovation in our Spinnaker sales and marketing programs.
A current priority area for us is maximizing our cross-selling capabilities. Because we utilize a specialized sales force, cross-selling techniques are different than what you might hear from companies that have -- that use a more generalist sales force approach. Our goal is to use data analytics to identify customer sites in which we have low cross-selling penetration. We then use contacts and references to develop warm and hot leads to other product categories. It involves data and qualification analytics, and these leads have proven to be very effective in converting to sales.
Another innovative techniques we are using to stay fully engaged with customer is greater use of webinars. In the past, we would conduct a few hundred webinars annually. While our goal this year is to launch 2,000 webinars in local languages, which helps to overcome the limitations we face with customer interactions due to the pandemic. We have professionalized the delivery of the webinars and have expanded our topics to include items such as compliance, productivity, Industry 4.0, and data integrity. From a customer's perspective, webinars are very cost and time-efficient while still allowing for interactions with experts from various businesses.
Our supply chain team and pricing team are also demonstrating a high level of innovation. For our supply chain team, agility continues to be a necessity in overcoming the many challenges of the current environment. At the same time, they also continue to make excellent progress on Stern Drive, our corporate initiative to continuously improve and drive world-class operations and supply chain. Stern Drive comprises several hundred projects throughout manufacturing and back-office operations focused on material cost reductions, shop floor productivity, and back-office productivity.
Finally, the pricing team also shown great resilience and agility in reacting to inflationary pressures. They moved quickly earlier this year to implement certain midyear price changes and at the same time, they continue to work strategically on some pricing initiatives to help improve the efficiency and effectiveness of life quotes to customers. Incorporating data analytics into upfront processes will make quoting more effective and easier and more efficient for our salespeople. These are just a few of many examples we have internally in which we continue to move our initiatives to another level.
We recently held a virtual leadership meeting with senior leaders from around the world with the theme of doubling down to drive growth. What we emphasize to our senior leaders and to you today is we have a great strategy in place, and we'll execute on it in an even more determined way than before. We will continue to invest in innovation to double down on enhancing our initiatives that are the foundation of our future growth. We remain confident that our strategies are effective in capturing market share and driving sales and operating profit. That concludes our prepared remarks, and I want to ask the operator to open the line for questions.
