Patrick Kaltenbach
Chief Executive Officer at Mettler-Toledo International
Thanks, Shawn. Let me start with some comments on our operating businesses, starting with Lab, which grew approximately 5% compared to last year. We had good growth across most of the portfolio and regions and continue to benefit from our robust offering and recent innovations as well as our initiatives to accelerate growth in service and consumables. Pharma customer activity has been mixed, but improving at a low pace.
Our process analytics business returned to solid growth this quarter as our bioproduction customers have finished destocking excess inventories. To expand our already broad portfolio of instruments we offer to our laboratory customers, we recently launched a new stain-free automated cell counter and a new microplate reader to help our customers in R&D and QA/QC labs. These new products add further to the long list of innovations we have brought to the market in recent years and expand our technology leadership.
Shifting now to our Industrial business, sales for the quarter were flat and slightly lower than expected, primarily due to market headwinds in China. Product inspection sales growth of 1% benefited from our growth initiatives targeting the mid-market, but the food manufacturing industry remains challenged overall. Our core industrial sales declined 1%, reflecting sluggish market conditions across most industries.
Our team remains active in leveraging Spinnaker to identify and capture the most attractive market opportunities in core industrial, which has reduced our sensitivity to the economy, although we are not immune. Additionally, we have further enhanced our portfolio and have expanded our line of weighing terminals that feature integrated software solutions, leveraging advanced algorithms. These new terminals provide process automation control for many different filling and dosing workflows, seamlessly integrating into customer systems. Lastly, shifting to our food retail business. As I mentioned earlier, our food retail sales declined against a very significant project-related growth in the prior year.
Now, let me make some additional comments by geography. Starting in the Americas, our sales declined 1% in the quarter. We had good growth across our Lab portfolio with pharma customers, while food retail declined against a very significant growth in the prior year. Core Industrial sales declined slightly as demand for automation related solutions was offset by lower demand in other areas.
Sales in Europe grew 1% in the quarter and included growth both from Laboratory and core industrial, benefiting from modest growth from pharma customers, while food manufacturing remained soft. Our teams in Europe continue to execute well despite challenging economic conditions across the region.
And finally, our Asia/Rest of World results this quarter were in line with our expectations. Our China operations returned to sales growth in the quarter due to easier comparisons and strong execution of our sales team, but underlying demand remained soft due to weak economic growth and excess capacity in certain industries. Our teams across Asia continue to execute very well on driving sales and market share growth. Targeting growth in emerging markets such as Southeast Asia and India remain an important element of our long-term growth strategy.
In summary, market conditions overall have remained challenged, but our team is executing very well. We have continued to fund important growth investments in areas like innovation and field sales and service, while we have reinforced our unique go-to-market strategies with the launch of the next wave of Spinnaker. In 2025, we will make additional targeted investment in these areas to further extend our market leadership and strengthen our competitive advantages.
An important element of our growth algorithm is gaining market share in our highly fragmented markets and pursuing growth opportunities in faster-growing market segments. Spinnaker helps us in identifying these new growth opportunities and guides our sales force to ensure we maximize our potential.
We continue to see significant market trends and opportunities related to the localization of strategically important technologies, investments to develop new energy solutions for the future and efforts to increase resilience in supply chains around the world. At the same time, customers continue to see productivity and insights through automation and digitalization.
Spinnaker encompasses our lead generation programs with existing customers and it houses our TopK program to identify growth opportunities with potential new customers. TopK uses proprietary data analytics on our internal big data warehouse and external data sources to identify and pursue opportunities.
Our teams are expanding our capabilities in this area to automate more of the qualification processes and accelerating the rate that we can generate tailored and actionable investment alerts for our field sales force. This program has been very important in driving lead growth with new customers this year and our team remains focused on expanding our data sets and adding sophisticated analytics and automation to enhance this program in 2025.
Another important driver for our long-term growth is to accelerate the growth of our Service business. As a reminder, Service represents approximately 25% of our sales and has grown 7% on a year-to-date basis in local currencies, which includes very strong growth of 9% in the third quarter. Service will continue to be an important growth driver in the future. Service is a key part of our solutions offering and is a very important competitive advantage as we support our customers' ability to maintain uptime, improve productivity and comply with regulatory requirements.
We believe we have the largest service network amongst our direct competitors with over 3,000 technicians delivering a very professional and consistent service experience to customers throughout the world. Our customer satisfaction ratings for our Service business and our net promoter scores are excellent and are at record high levels. We aim to grow our Service business faster than the company average over the medium term and are making dedicated investments in field technicians, in tele sales and data analytics resources to support our growth aspirations.
Additionally, we continue to benefit from our actions to improve the productivity of our service organization and increase capacity to serve customers, including leveraging new software capabilities to estimate service durations, semi-automated scheduling of service visits and utilizing expanded core triage capabilities to resolve service requests remotely and reduce trips to our customer locations.
We're also expanding the use of sophisticated data analytics and automation technologies to increase the effectiveness of our dedicated service sales team. Our largest opportunity is servicing a greater proportion of our installed base, which approximates $3 billion of potential service revenue. Today, we have penetrated about one-third of this opportunity. And given the vast amount of data we possess about it, like when an instrument was sold, who is using it, in what application it's being used, we can create targeted sales campaigns to service them specifically tailored to their needs based on our data. This will help further expand our coverage.
Service contracts help ensure that the measurements from our precision instruments are reliable and also help prevent costly downtime. We have maintained our focus on selling more service packages at the point of new product sale. Over the years, we have made important enhancements and differentiation to service levels of prepaid contracts to meet the varying needs of our customers.
We have also enhanced our portfolio of services over the years with solutions like our RapidCal Tank Scale Calibration service. Regular calibration of tank scales is required across industries such as pharma and chemical to ensure measurements are accurate and reliable. Our RapidCal service can calibrate these scales three times faster than traditional methods and also does not require the tank to be emptied, cleaned and filled with expensive ultra-pure water that would need to be discharged afterwards. So it is not only faster, but also much more efficient and environmentally friendly.
We have also enhanced our offering of certified calibration certificates to ensure compliance with regulations and avoid cost of inaccurate measurements. Our calibration services are highly differentiated from the competition and include our comprehensive and audit proof electronic documentation that adheres to the highest standards -- to the highest industry standards.
So, that is a brief overview of the efforts we have underway to accelerate our growth by reinforcing our unique go-to-market approaches with Spinnaker, identifying and capturing growth opportunities with new customers and growth industries and accelerating the growth rate of our service business. We expect our focused execution on these initiatives will continue to deliver very tangible benefits over the next year and beyond.
Now, this concludes our prepared remarks. Operator, I'd now like to open the line to questions.