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Galaxy Nutritional Foods, Inc. Business Information, Profile, and History

2441 Viscount Row
Orlando, Florida 32809
U.S.A.

Company Perspectives:

Our corporate mission is to extend and improve the quality of life everywhere by providing innovative, healthy foods which may significantly reduce the risk of certain diseases linked to the consumption of high fat, high cholesterol foods and other foods with harmful ingredients. With our great tasting and timely product line, we believe we are well on our way to accomplishing this mission. In fact, we are convinced that eating foods which combine primarily plant-based, all natural, nutraceutical ingredients such as those from Galaxy Nutritional Foods will become a way of life in the 21st century.

History of Galaxy Nutritional Foods, Inc.

Galaxy Nutritional Foods, Inc., develops, produces, and distributes plant-based dairy and dairy alternative products for the retail and food service markets. The company's products are made with plant proteins such as soy, rice, and oats, offering consumers more nutritional substitutes for traditional dairy products. Galaxy makes a full range of products that complement the company's core line of cheeses, including butter, milk, yogurt, cream cheese, pizza, and ice cream. The company's brand names include "Galaxy Nutritional Foods," "Veggie," "Nature's Alternative," "Veggie Lite Bakery," "Veggie Café," "Soyco," "Soymage," "Wholesome Valley," "Lite Bakery," and "Formagg." Galaxy's products are sold domestically and internationally to a variety of purchasers, including retail stores, restaurants, cafeterias, hospitals, and schools.

Origins

Galaxy's founder, Angelo S. Morini, invented the company's defining product, a healthy cheese alternative, decades before health-consciousness swept through U.S. society. Morini began experimenting with a new way to produce cheese in 1968, the year he received a B.S. degree in Business Administration from Youngstown State University. Although his academic training was in business, Morini also had a penchant for science, the discipline that would aid his development of Formagg, a cheese substitute with decidedly healthier characteristics than natural cheese. Morini, the president of his high school's science club, dramatically altered the fat profile of natural cheese in his experiments begun in 1968. He removed the highly saturated butterfat present in natural cheese and replaced it with partially hydrogenated soybean oil, which contained healthier monounsaturates and polyunsaturates. The result, after tinkering with the recipe, was what Morini dubbed Formagg, a cheese substitute that contained no cholesterol, lactose, or butterfat. Formagg contained one-third fewer calories than natural cheese and provided more calcium, vitamins, and minerals than its conventional counterpart.

After receiving his degree from Youngstown State, Morini held a number of jobs, each related to food. When he was not working on the development of Formagg, he worked at his family's chain of grocery stores, located in New Castle, Pennsylvania, and operated under the banner Morini Markets. Morini also worked for General Foods Company and the food service division of Pillsbury Company before he founded his own company, Fiesta Foods & Galaxy Foods, in 1972. The company was producing a mozzarella cheese substitute for Morini's pizza business in Elwood City, Pennsylvania, and quickly found other customers. The company's success, in fact, became its own undoing. Fiesta Foods & Galaxy Foods grew to be a $10 million-in-sales business in a rush, but labor and financial problems just as quickly overwhelmed Morini. "The bank I was with wouldn't lend me the money to grow," he remembered in a March 20, 1989 interview with the Pittsburgh Business Times. Morini was forced to shutter the business, but it would not be long before Formagg resurfaced in the marketplace.

Not long after Fiesta Foods & Galaxy Foods choked on its own growth, the company's future was aided by the first stirrings of a more health-conscious populace. Nutritionists began urging the public to reduce the sodium, cholesterol, and saturated fats in its diet, advice that an increasing number of Americans heeded. Morini brought his company back and centered Fiesta Foods & Galaxy Foods on the industrial and food service market. In both of these segments the company scored success.

Expansion in the 1980s

The 1980s represented a formative decade for Morini's entrepreneurial concern, presenting both prosperous conditions and trying events. In 1980, the company adopted a new corporate title for its character-building period of development, changing its name to Galaxy Cheese Company. From Morini's boyhood hometown of New Castle, Galaxy Cheese entered a decade that would require it to expand and remodel its headquarter facility 13 times, indicating the growth that the company experienced during its second decade of existence. During the 1980s, the United States was the fastest-growing cheese consumption nation in the world, providing a fertile climate for Galaxy Cheese's growth. By 1984, the company was generating more than $6.5 million in sales and growing at a pace that required Morini to treat his company as a burgeoning corporate concern. He filed for an initial public offering (IPO) of stock, turning to Wall Street to supply the capital needed to fuel Galaxy Cheese's expansion. The IPO was completed in September 1987, occurring at exactly the wrong time to ensure Galaxy Cheese ended the decade with the vitality that had characterized the company before the IPO.

On October 17, 1987, weeks after the IPO, the stock market suffered a severe crisis, collapsing on a day that quickly became known as "Black Monday." The financial catastrophe cost Galaxy Cheese $1 million, forcing the company to virtually eliminate its advertising budget. From there, the company's troubles deepened. At roughly the same time as Black Monday, Galaxy Cheese lost its most important customer, a national food distributor named Pueringer Distributors, Inc. Another company acquired Pueringer, leading to the loss of Pueringer's business, which had accounted for 42 percent of Galaxy Cheese's total sales. To exacerbate matters, the price of casein, a derivative of skim milk and a main ingredient in Formagg, soared, jumping from $.96 to $2.30. These pernicious developments struck Galaxy in relatively quick succession, sending the company reeling and barring it from profitability for the next several years.

Despite the calamity of the late 1980s, Galaxy ended the decade on a solid footing. Profits had yet to return, but there were nevertheless other signs of strength. The company's headquarters occupied 60,000 square feet in Northgate Industrial Park, where Galaxy's manufacturing facility was able to produce two million pounds of Morini's signature cheese each week. (The plant was operating at 20 percent of capacity at the end of the 1980s, however.) Sales during the second half of the 1980s had increased robustly, tripling to more than $15 million. Furthermore, the loss of Pueringer had one positive influence on the company, providing some solace for an otherwise stinging blow. Morini had planned to lessen the company's distribution of Formagg to the industrial market and increase its presence in more lucrative markets, namely the retail and food service markets. The loss of Pueringer accelerated the company's shift away from the industrial market, where profits ranged between 5 percent and 15 percent, and sped its entry into the retail and food service markets, where profit margins ran as high as 65 percent. By the end of the 1980s, Galaxy products were available in more than 35 states, with full national coverage expected by the beginning of the 1990s.

Product Line Extensions in the 1990s

Galaxy's market presence spread well beyond the United States by the beginning of the 1990s as its product line deepened. Galaxy products were available in Kuwait, Australia, and Canada, with penetration into West Germany, France, Belgium, and Japan expected to occur in the near future. As the company widened its distribution scope, it also expanded its product line. Galaxy's industrial, retail, and food service divisions produced items such as grated Parmesan and Romano flavored Formagg, shredded Mozzarella, Provolone, Cheddar, and American flavored Formagg, and Longhorn, Monterey, Jack, and Colby Formagg loafs. The company also produced several varieties of pizzas and a line of cheesecakes and cream cheeses. In addition to its industrial, retail, and food service divisions, Galaxy also operated a health food division that catered to health food stores. Through Soyco Foods, the company offered a line of soy and vegan products, including cheese, butter, and sour cream.

During the 1990s, Galaxy greatly expanded its product offerings, completing its development from a substitute cheese producer into a broadly based dairy alternative company. As part of this developmental process, the company moved its headquarters, abandoning Morini's home turf in New Castle. In June 1991, Galaxy moved to Orlando, Florida, where it unveiled a state-of-the art manufacturing facility. From Orlando, the company began shipping its popular products to its two principal markets, retail and food service. Attention to the industrial market, once the mainstay of the company, had waned. Instead, Galaxy now focused its efforts on the supermarket chains, mass merchandisers, and natural food stores that composed the retail sector, and the restaurants, cafeterias, hospitals, and schools that composed the food service sector. One year after the move to Orlando, the company changed its name to reflect the transformation that was taking place. In June 1992, the company dropped Galaxy Cheese Company as its corporate title and adopted the more inclusive name of Galaxy Foods Company.

As consumer consciousness of nutrition increased during the 1990s, Galaxy responded by developing an ever-broadening selection of products. The company used its research and development offices in Orlando to become the premier U.S. producer of a diverse line of low and no fat, no saturated fat, low and no cholesterol, and no lactose cheese and dairy-related products. Among the product line extensions devised during the 1990s, none ranked of greater importance than the company's Veggie line. Introduced in 1996, the Veggie brand comprised a selection of soy-based products that quickly became the company's greatest contributor to annual revenues, bolstering its presence in the retail sector. The company developed an unusual marketing strategy for its Veggie brand, selling its plant-based dairy alternatives in produce sections of supermarkets rather than selling its products through supermarket dairy cases.

During the late 1990s, the line separating mainstream supermarkets and specialty health food stores became increasingly blurred. Conventional grocery stores were now stocking items previously found only in health food stores, a trend that worked decidedly in Galaxy's favor. The healthy and natural foods category--the segment in which Galaxy held sway--became the fastest growing part of the retail food market, providing ample demand for the company's 100,000-square-foot facility in Orlando. In 2000, Galaxy Foods Company again changed its name to better reflect its product focus, becoming Galaxy Nutritional Foods, Inc.

Despite the favorable business climate, Galaxy experienced some difficulties, particularly as the company entered the 21st century. In 2001, when the company generated nearly $45.4 million in sales, it reported a loss of more than $6 million. The following year, the company's 30th anniversary, was pocked by a massive $19 million loss. A number of factors were to blame, including production and shipping difficulties, rising overhead costs, and a change in production focus that whittled the company's product line from 400 items down to 200 items. The production problems, which involved a new slicing machine, were resolved by September 2001, but the damage done was clearly identifiable by the end of the company's fiscal 2002 in March of that year.

Galaxy was able to recover from the losses recorded in 2001 and 2002, and it did so with a new leader. In December 2002, Christopher J. New, Galaxy's chief operating officer, was appointed as the company's chief executive officer. Morini reduced his responsibilities to those accorded to the posts of president and vice-chairman. In the transition of day-to-day control from Morini to New, Galaxy posted comforting financial totals for the company's fiscal 2003. For the year, the company registered $1 million in net income, the result of four quarters of positive operating profits. Further encouraging news arrived in June 2003, when Galaxy entered into a master distribution and licensing agreement with Fromageries Bel S.A., the number one branded cheese company in Europe. Under the terms of the agreement, Fromageries Bel secured the exclusive rights to distribute Galaxy products in more than 30 European countries. In the years ahead, similar partnerships, coupled with the company's continued efforts to capitalize on the fastest growing sector of the retail food market, promised to hold it in good stead. Galaxy, an industry pioneer, stood poised for growth, its management intent on building on the success established by Morini.

Principal Subsidiaries: Soyco Foods, Inc.

Principal Competitors: The Hain Celestial Group, Inc.; Tofutti Brands Inc.; White Wave, Inc.

Related information about Galaxy

The huge star family to which our Sun belongs, seen as the Milky Way. In shape it is basically a bulging flat disc, diameter 35 kiloparsec, thickness 3000 parsec at the centre, and 300 parsec elsewhere. The Sun is 8000 parsec from the nucleus. Within this disc there are star clusters and interstellar matter. A pair of spiral arms merges from the nucleus and is superimposed on the general distribution of stars. The Galaxy as a whole rotates, faster at the centre than further out. The Sun takes 250 million years for one circuit. There are over 100 000 000 000 stars in all, and the Galaxy is 10–15 thousand million years old.

A huge family of stars held together by their mutual gravitational attractions. Galaxies exist in a great variety of forms, ellipticals predominating, but spirals featuring prominently in popular books on account of their notable shapes. Masses range from a few million suns to 10 million million times as many. The nearest galaxies to the Milky Way are the Magellanic Clouds, some 55 000 parsec away. The furthest seen to date could be 2000 megaparsec or more. Galaxies are the fundamental building blocks of the universe, and are consequently of immense importance in cosmology. There are numerous special types. About one galaxy in a million is a radio galaxy, an intense source of cosmic radio waves. A Seyfert galaxy has a brilliant nucleus and inconspicuous spiral arms; it is a strong emitter of infrared radiation, and is also detectable as a radio and X-ray source. A Markarian galaxy is one with excessive ultraviolet emission, discovered by Armenian astronomer B E Markarian at Byurakan Observatory in the 1970s. Quasars could be a type of extremely luminous galaxy. A galaxy which is either unusually energetic or varies in luminosity is known as an active galaxy.

otheruses
A galaxy is a huge gravitationally bound system of stars, interstellar gas and dust, plasma, and (possibly) unseen dark matter. In addition to single stars and a tenuous interstellar medium, most galaxies contain a large number of multiple star systems and star clusters as well as various types of nebulae. Most galaxies are several thousand to several hundred thousand light years in diameter and are usually separated from one another by distances on the order of millions of light years.

Although theoretical dark matter appears to account for around 90% of the mass of most galaxies, the nature of these unseen components is not well understood. There is some evidence that supermassive black holes may exist at the center of many, if not all, galaxies.

Intergalactic space, the space between galaxies, is filled with a tenuous plasma with an average density less than one atom per cubic meter. In Greek mythology, Zeus placed his son by a mortal woman, the infant Hercules, on Hera's breast as she was asleep, so that the baby would drink her divine milk and thus become immortal.

Observation history

This account of the history of the investigation of our own and other galaxies is largely taken from James Binney and Michael Merrifield: Galactic astronomy.James Binney and Michael Merrifield: Galactic astronomy, Princeton University Press, 1998

In 1610, Galileo Galilei used a telescope to study the bright band on the night sky known as the Milky Way and discovered that it was composed of a huge number of faint stars. In a treatise in 1755, Immanuel Kant, drawing on earlier work by Thomas Wright, speculated (correctly) that the Galaxy might be a rotating body of a huge number of stars, held together by gravitational forces akin to the solar system but on much larger scales. Kant also conjectured that some of the nebulae visible in the night sky might be separate galaxies.

Towards the end of the 18th century, Charles Messier compiled a catalog containing the 109 brightest nebulae, later followed by a larger catalog of five thousand nebulae assembled by William Herschel. In 1845, Lord Rosse constructed a new telescope and was able to distinguish between elliptical and spiral nebulae. In 1936, Hubble produced a classification system for galaxies that is used to this day, the Hubble sequence.

The first attempt to describe the shape of the Milky Way and the position of Sol within it was carried out by William Herschel in 1785 by carefully counting the number of stars in different regions of the sky. A different method by Harlow Shapley based on the cataloging of globular clusters lead to a radically different picture: a flat disk with diameter ~70 kiloparsecs and Sol far from the center. Both analyses failed to take into account the absorption of light by interstellar dust present in the galactic plane; once Robert Julius Trumpler had quantified this effect in 1930 by studying open clusters, the present picture of our galaxy as described above emerged.

In 1944, Hendrik van de Hulst predicted microwave radiation at a wavelength of 21 cm, resulting from interstellar atomic hydrogen gas; In the 1970s it was discovered in Vera Rubin's study of the rotation speed of gas in galaxies that the total visible mass (from stars and gas) does not properly account for the speed of the rotating gas. This galaxy rotation problem is thought to be explained by the presence of large quantities of unseen dark matter.

Beginning in the 1990s, the Hubble Space Telescope yielded improved observations. Improved technology in detecting the spectra invisible to humans (radio telescopes, infra-red cameras, x-ray telescopes), allow detection of other galaxies that are not detected by Hubble.

Types of galaxies

Galaxies come in three main types: ellipticals, spirals, and irregulars. Since the Hubble sequence is entirely based upon visual morphological type, it may miss certain important characteristics of galaxies such as star formation rate (in starburst galaxies) or activity in the core (in active galaxies).

Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, sometimes simply called the Galaxy (with uppercase), is a large disk-shaped barred spiral galaxy about 30 kiloparsecs or a hundred light millennia in diameter and three light millennia in thickness. It contains about 3×10¹¹ (three hundred billion) stars and has a total mass of about 6×10¹¹ (six hundred billion) times the mass of Sol.

In spiral galaxies, the spiral arms have the shape of approximate logarithmic spirals, a pattern that can be theoretically shown to result from a disturbance in a uniformly rotating mass of stars. The arms are visible because the high density facilitates star formation and they therefore harbor many bright and young stars.

Despite the prominence of large elliptical and spiral galaxies, most galaxies in the universe appear to be dwarf galaxies. Dwarf galaxies may also be classified as elliptical, spiral or irregular. The standard model for such active galactic nucleus is based upon energy generation from matter falling into a supermassive black hole at the core region.

Galaxies that emit high-energy radiation in the form of x-rays are classified as Seyfert galaxies, quasars and blazars. Active galaxies that emit radio frequencies from relativistic jets erupting from the core are classified as Radio galaxies. Structures containing up to about 50 galaxies are called groups of galaxies, and larger structures containing many thousands of galaxies packed into an area a few megaparsecs across are called clusters. at the supercluster scale, galaxies are arranged into sheets and filaments surrounding vast empty voids. Above this scale, the universe appears to be isotropic and homogeneous.

Our galaxy is a member of the Local Group, which it dominates together with the Andromeda Galaxy; The Local Group is part of the Virgo Supercluster, which is dominated by the Virgo Cluster (of which our Galaxy is not a member). Zero-metal high-velocity halo stars (called Population III stars) are the first to develop around a protogalaxy as it starts to contract. These huge stars quickly supernova, releasing heavy elements into the interstellar medium. Within the next billion years, globular clusters, the central supermassive black hole and galactic bulge of metal-poor Population II stars form. The galaxy will continue to absorb infalling material from high velocity clouds and dwarf galaxies throughout its life; the cycle of stellar birth and death will increase the abundance of heavy elements, eventually allowing the formation of planets.

Probably the oldest galaxy yet found, IOK-1, was discovered in September 2006 by Masanori Iye at National Astronomical Observatory of Japan using the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii.

The existence of such old protogalaxies suggests that they must have grown in the so-called "Dark Ages" (before the first generation of stars) from anisotropic irregularities present during the era of recombination, some three hundred thousand years after the Big Bang. Such irregularities of the right scale were observed using the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) in 2003.

More evidence for this model of galactic formation comes from detection of ancient Population III stars. The giant star, HE0107-5240, discovered in 2002 by researchers at the University of Hamburg, is believed to be the oldest yet discovered star in the Milky Way, since unlike younger stars, it is virtually metal-free.

Evolution

Studies show that the Milky Way Galaxy is moving towards the nearby Andromeda Galaxy at about 130 km/s, and depending upon the lateral movements, the two may collide in about five to six billion years. However, gravitational stripping of the interstellar gas and dust that makes up the spiral arms will produce a long train of stars, similar to that seen in NGC 250 or the Antennae Galaxies.

Although the Milky Way has never collided with a galaxy as large as Andromeda before, evidence of past collisions of the Milky Way with smaller dwarf galaxies is increasing.

Spiral galaxies, like the Milky Way, only produce new generations of stars as long as they continue to have dense molecular clouds of interstellar hydrogen in their spiral arms. as stars convert hydrogen into heavier elements, fewer stars will form.fact

After the end of stellar formation in under one hundred billion years, the "stellar age" will come to an end after about ten trillion to one hundred trillion years (10¹³?10¹⁴ years), as the smallest longest-lived stars in our astrosphere, tiny red dwarfs begin to fade. At the end of the stellar age galaxies will comprise compact objects: brown dwarfs, black dwarfs, cooling white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. Eventually, as a result of gravitational relaxation, all stars will either fall into the central supermassive black hole of the galaxies, or be flung into the depths of intergalactic space as a result of collisions.

Galactic biology

Biology as we know it is currently assumed to exist only around single, third-generation G-type stars in the middle regions of the spiral arms of spiral galaxies, like the sun. Elliptical galaxies, produced as a result of many galactic collisions, quickly lose their clouds of interstellar hydrogen gas, and cannot make new generations of stars.

References

Terence Dickinson: The Universe and Beyond (Fourth Edition), Firefly Books Ltd.

Chronology

Key Dates:
1968: Angelo Morini begins developing Formagg.
1972: Morini forms Fiesta Foods & Galaxy Foods.
1980: Morini changes the name of his company to Galaxy Cheese Company.
1987: Galaxy Cheese completes its initial public offering of stock.
1991: Galaxy Cheese relocates to Orlando, Florida.
1996: The company's Veggie brand is introduced.
2000: Galaxy Nutritional Foods, Inc. is adopted as the company's new name.
2002: Christopher New replaces Morini as chief executive officer.

Additional topics

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