History

Champion Laboratories, Inc. was founded in 1936 in Meriden, Connecticut. Today, the company is a major manufacturer of petroleum dispenser filters, automotive and heavy-duty oil, air, hydraulic, gasoline, and diesel fuel filters. After the merger with Kleen-Pak Corporation in 1958, operations were moved to West Salem, Illinois. Eight years later, the company established a second manufacturing facility in Albion, Illinois, now corporate headquarters. Today, Champion Laboratories, Inc. operates at three locations. Altogether, we occupy over one million square feet of space devoted to engineering, research and development, quality control, manufacturing, distribution, and marketing.

Champion first gained a reputation as an industry leader in filter design and technology by developing and patenting the first up-front by-pass valve for spinon oil filters. As an industry leader, we are dedicated to providing our customers with the highest quality filter products and customer service second to none.

We don’t believe in compromising quality for price; we simply will not do that. Instead, we’ve carefully structured a manufacturing capability unique to the filter industry. We control quality from beginning to end to our uncompromising standards, and we subscribe to the principles established worldwide by the International Standards Organization. The benefit to our customers is two-fold: consistent high quality with extremely competitive pricing.

As a basic manufacturer, Champion Laboratories produces in our own plants almost all of the component parts that go into our products. This requires tremendous capital investment and, even more importantly, the necessary research and development, engineering, manufacturing, and marketing expertise to capitalize on this totally vertical alignment.

This commitment has led us to develop a filter company more self-sufficient than any other:

Complete formulation, blending and production of plastisols and adhesives used in all oil, fuel and air filter manufacturing. No other filter manufacturer has this capability in-house.
Three separate manufacturing facilities located in Albion, Illinois; York, South Carolina and Shanghai, China. Champion manufactures more than 600,000 filters per day. Total manufacturing and warehouse space is over 1.5 million square feet, of which 340,000 square feet is warehouse with 37,600 pallet locations.
Complete engineering facilities using the latest in computer-aided design and component structural analysis. Our current engineering staff consists of over 61 full-time engineers with more than 1,229 years of combined experience.
A self-contained, state-of-the-art and accredited research and development laboratory that monitors day-to-day quality, develops new products, and researches the filtration challenges related to constantly changing fuels, i.e. Ethanol, Biodiesel, ULSD and synthetic lubes.
Sophisticated computerized management information systems that serve customer needs as well as our own internal quality, cost and inventory control programs.
Toll-free calls for technical assistance.
Long-standing memberships in PEI, MEMA, APAA, ASIA, AWDA, SAE, NFPA, AFS and FMC.
Geographic distribution literally covering the world.
A broad product line that offers coverage for domestic and international markets.

In a word, sensible

At Champion Laboratories, we never forget that profit is still our customers’ Number One objective. Champion Laboratories firmly believes we can make a positive contribution to our customers’ profit objectives to earn their continued confidence. Our remarkably low turnover among major customers is testimony to this philosophy