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 had strong sales growth in the quarter, with strong growth across most of our product portfolio, especially in the Analytical Instruments and Process Analytics while our pipette business was down due to a decline in pipette tips. Overall, we continued to see growth with pharma and biopharma customers as well as the faster-growing segments such as the lithium batteries and others and expect favorable results in 2023.
Turning now to industrial business where core industrial had solid growth in each region and continues to benefit from market trends toward automation and digitalization. Our outlook for this year is positive, although I'd note this business is not immune to potential changes in the economy and will require us to remain agile to identify and target growth opportunities. Product Inspection sales were stronger than expected this quarter with very strong sales in the Americas. Europe had modest growth as we saw better customer activity compared to the last quarter. Overall, we expect to have a positive start in 2023 and product inspection with good growth in the Americas. However, we remain cautious in Europe with softer conditions in packaged foods.
Finally, food retail delivered very strong growth with project activities in the Americas and Europe offset in part by a significant sales decline in China due to disruptions from the pandemic. Now, let me make some additional comments by geography. Sales in Europe increased 9% in the quarter, better than we had expected and inclusive of 4% headwind from stopping our shipments to Russia. We saw good growth across most product categories in Europe, particularly in Process Analytics and retail. The potential energy crisis and related impact on customer demand has also been better than expected. But we of course still need to get through the rest of the winter.
Sales in the Americas was again strong with especially good growth across product inspection and food retail. And finally, Asia and the rest of the world had another quarter of good growth led by our Lab business. China grew 11%, with particularly strong growth in lab. Switching now to our service business. We continue to see excellent momentum and service sales grew 11% in the quarter and 12% for the year. Service remains an important contributor to our profits and key advantage versus our competition. Also customers that use our service are more likely to buy instruments from us again in the future.
Given the importance of our service business, I'd like to share a few more details on our strategy and initiatives. To start-off, as a reminder service represents 20% of our revenues and is a key part of our solution offering. Our service offering is comprehensive and includes installation, qualification, calibration, preventative maintenance, spare parts, and repair services. Over 50% of our service revenues represent service contracts that support our customers' ability to maintain uptime, improved productivity, and comply with regulatory requirements. An important piece of our business is calibration services and our comprehensive and audit proof electronic calibration certificates are fully traceable and available on demand from a secure database.
This makes it very easy for our customers to comply with regulatory requirements. We have very strong competitive advantages with our service business and excellent opportunities to accelerate our growth. We believe we have the largest installed base of weighing instruments in the world and the largest service network across our direct competitors with over 3,000 service technicians around the world. We have a standard global service offering with dedicated service sales experts. This global coverage is increasingly important as customers look for consistent service around the world.
Our ability to serve customers during the pandemic has proven to be a strong competitive advantage and our service offering was especially important to customers in regulated environments. The introduction of new service levels, 24x7 support, and remote diagnostics helped -- have been helpful in supporting customers. We have seen continued improvement in our net promoter scores in recent years and throughout 2022 which -- which measures customer satisfaction after service event. We are focused on accelerating our service growth given these competitive advantages and strong customer satisfaction and over the medium term, would expect our service sales to outpace our product sales.
To achieve this there are two important elements of our growth strategy besides continuously upgrading our offering. Penetrating our large installed base of instruments and selling service contracts at the point of product sales. Starting first with penetrating our installed base. We have a large installed base of instruments. We have sold over many years, the majority of which is not serviced by us today. To further penetrate this installed base we use the same concept and similar approaches with advanced big data analytics that we use when selling products but with more specific data about history, needs[phonetic], current penetration, and potential of a customer.
Our service telesales teams can leverage this data to run marketing campaigns based on the age, warranty, service history, and projected service intervals of our instruments to generate a service lead when an instrument is most likely to require service. Additionally, we use sophisticated data analytics for salesforce guidance to identify carefully selected high-potential accounts for our field service sales team. Selling services contracts at the point of sales is another high priority focus for us. Over the past year, we revamped our sales trainings and product quoting process to automatically provide a quote for service contract at the point of sale.
Productizing service has also been beneficial in providing and communicating the value of the service contract to customer in an easy way. Providing service on the service contract is a win-win for us and the customer. It ensures high-reliability and accuracy of measurement for our customers and also helps prevent costly failed experiments, poor production quality, or unplanned downtime from devices that are not properly maintained or calibrated. Our technicians are able to build deeper relationships with customers and become trusted advisors. Service contracts are also a benefit for our service team as they are able to more efficiently schedule service calls weeks in advance leveraging our territory and route planning and analytics to optimize the productivity of the team.
Additionally, customer satisfaction is higher for customers with service contracts and as I said, those customers are more likely to purchase our instruments again. Overall, I feel very good with our service growth strategies, but they will position us well to grow this very important and very profitable portion of our business over the coming years. As we look ahead, through 2023, we expect to face continued uncertainty in the global economy and challenging multi-year sales growth comparisons. Our ability to demonstrate resilience and agility during difficult times is an important signature of our culture.
I am confident we will all -- we will be able to react quickly to the new challenges and opportunities that arise and so we can continue to gain share and deliver solid results. Now that concludes our prepared remarks and then I want to open the call for questions.