HPC Standards: residue reference materials and isotope-labelled standards from Germany

What HPC Standards GmbH does

HPC Standards GmbH develops, manufactures and distributes reference materials for residue analysis. The catalogue covers four areas: pesticides, veterinary drugs, the metabolites of both, and stable isotope-labelled reference materials. The company is based in Jesewitz, Saxony, Germany; its trading address is Am Wieseneck 7, 04451 Cunnersdorf.

What separates HPC from most reference material suppliers on the Vietnamese market is that it manufactures rather than repackages. The direct consequence: when an analyte or a format is not in the catalogue, the company takes it on as a custom synthesis — the chemical name, the CAS Registry Number and the required specification are enough to start.

HPC is an independent company, not part of a group — unlike Dr. Ehrenstorfer, TRC and Mikromol, which all sit under LGC and which QEMIX covered in LGC reference standard brands. For a laboratory, the thing worth checking is not the size of the parent group but the scope written into the accreditation annex — the subject of the next section.

ISO 17034 and ISO 9001: what the scope actually covers

This section matters for ISO/IEC 17025 files, because these are the details an assessor will ask about.

HPC Standards GmbH is accredited by DAkkS — the German national accreditation body — as a reference material producer under DIN EN ISO 17034:2017, registration number D-RM-20844-01-01. The current annex was issued on 17 November 2025.

Alongside this, the company’s quality management system holds ISO 9001:2015 certification issued by TÜV SÜD Management Service GmbH under registration number 12 100 46238 TMS, valid from 8 January 2026 to 2 September 2028. The certified scope covers the design, development, production and distribution of reference materials, specialty chemicals and laboratory equipment.

The two documents answer different questions: ISO 17034 speaks to the competence to assign a reference material’s value; ISO 9001 speaks to how the business is run. An ISO/IEC 17025 file needs the first one.

Three product formats and how to read the vial label

Photographs of actual HPC products held in the QEMIX catalogue.

Depending on the analyte, the HPC catalogue offers three formats: neat materials for in-house preparation, single-component solutions supplied at a defined concentration and solvent, and stable isotope-labelled internal standards. Which one to choose depends on the analytical balance available, the method’s solvent and the monthly sample throughput — no format is better in the abstract.

The side label carries the seven pieces of information a laboratory needs at goods-in and in its records:

The QR code on the label leads to the manufacturer’s product record. Printing the hazard signal word and classification directly on the label allows storage to be sorted by hazard group without opening the SDS.

Four more HPC codes in the QEMIX catalogue

These four span three uses: a pyrethroid insecticide (Tefluthrin), an organochlorine acaricide added to Annex A of the Stockholm Convention in 2019 (Dicofol), and two plant growth regulators (1-Naphthylacetic acid, Prohexadione calcium).

The HPC range by analyte group

2,367 HPC codes are listed on qemix.co; below are real examples from each group.

HPC organises its catalogue by analyte rather than by method. For a buyer, the more useful way in is the group of parameters that has to be reported. The table below is arranged that way.

Beyond these groups the catalogue also holds pesticide metabolites (ESA, OA, desmethyl, sulfoxide, sulfone and others), nitrosamines, PAHs, PCBs, bisphenols, organotin compounds, banned dyes and pharmaceutical residues in water. The full range is searchable on the HPC brand page at QEMIX.

Stable isotope-labelled standards — the part laboratories most often under-order

Without a labelled internal standard there is no isotope dilution, and no correction for matrix effects.

In LC-MS/MS on complex matrices — seafood, meat, produce, edible oil — matrix effects can shift the signal by tens of percent without a solvent calibration curve showing anything. The standard response is to add a stable isotope-labelled analogue of the target analyte at the start of sample preparation and quantify on the area ratio. The labelled compound experiences the same losses and the same ion suppression as the analyte, so the correction happens inside the calculation.

HPC manufactures both native and labelled forms for many analytes, so the analyte–internal standard pair can be sourced from one manufacturer:

One ordering note: several internal standards are available both as neat material and as a ready-made solution — D10-Chlorpyrifos, for instance, also exists as 678119 at 100 µg/mL in acetonitrile. Where no microbalance is available, the solution is the better choice.

Mapping onto Vietnam’s list of 40 banned veterinary substances

Circular 10/2016/TT-BNNPTNT, Annex II — 24 substances banned in aquaculture and 16 in terrestrial livestock production.

This is the list that testing laboratories serving seafood and meat exports run most often. We checked 16 representative substances from it against the HPC range currently listed on qemix.co — all 16 have a code:

On the pesticide side, the corresponding instrument is Circular 50/2016/TT-BYT of 30 December 2016, issued by the Ministry of Health, setting maximum residue limits for pesticides in food. For export goods, the limits of the destination market — the EU, Japan, the United States, South Korea — are usually tighter and change faster than domestic regulation, so a laboratory’s target list should follow customer requirements rather than the circular alone.

What to prepare when ordering HPC reference materials

Five pieces of information that reduce the back-and-forth to a single round.

• The CAS number, not just the name. Many analytes exist in several forms — base, salt, hydrate, isomer — and each is a separate code with a different molecular weight. The CAS number removes most of that ambiguity.
• The format required: neat or solution. If a solution, state the solvent and concentration, because changing solvent means re-evaluating the method.
• Whether a labelled internal standard is needed. If the method quantifies by isotope dilution, order the analyte and its internal standard together — an incomplete order means waiting for another import cycle.
• Any CRM requirement. If the file requires a certified reference material, say so at the outset so the certificate of each code can be checked before ordering.
• Pack size and rate of use. Reference materials carry a lot-based expiry date; buying more than a year’s requirement is rarely economical.

2,367 HPC codes are currently listed on qemix.co. These are ordered from Germany per order rather than held in stock in Vietnam; lead time depends on the production lot and on whether the code requires cold-chain shipping. Analytes not in the catalogue can be ordered as a custom synthesis through the manufacturer.