Galaxy has a fairly robust business in the specialty mail-order catalog business. During the past holiday season, the company drop-shipped 13,000 packages out of its warehouse in a single day and sold close to $1,000,000 in mail order alone in December, according to Peter Biro, who is one of six European interns working at the company.

Specialty mail-order catalogs allow Galaxy to develop a relationship with consumers it wouldn't ordinarily have, Sears notes. Pairing a catalog, such as Williams-Sonoma with Galaxy Desserts, is a particularly good match for both companies, considering Williams-Sonoma's customer base and the products Galaxy provides, Sears adds.

The consumer packaged goods side is new for the company, having been launched last summer. The line, called Galaxy Desserts Jean-Yves Charon Collection, includes six SKUs, and is sold in the freezer section at supermarkets across the country. Products include mousse duos, chocolate lava cake, triple mousse cake and lemon tart. “We took the best selling products out of all our SKUs and put them in package form,” Sears says. “The philosophy behind it is we've got these great products and great recognition of our brand in the trade and from our specialty catalog business, why not launch that out to the consumer? Our consumer packaged goods line is a very small percentage of our total business, but it's an important one, and it's growing. It's a strategic initiative for us over the next couple of years.”

Business-oriented production

Galaxy's production area is organized by business category. Output from the croissant room accounts for about 30 percent of the company's business, and the mousse room and baking room produce about 40 percent and 30 percent output respectively.

While certain procedures in the production of Galaxy's pastries and desserts have been automated, Charon holds firm to his belief that croissants must be hand rolled, so the dough isn't pressed too tightly. “We can cut the dough and fold the dough mechanically, but I haven't seen one machine-rolled croissant get the same flakiness as one rolled by hand,” Charon says.

Croissants are produced with about 200 lb. to 250 lb. batches of dough that are alternately folded with butter into 144 layers. Croissant dough rests for one hour before more butter is added, and then the dough rests for another hour or two. The dough is then cut, hand rolled and blast frozen. Croissants are sold as frozen dough and are proofed and baked by the end user.

“About 90 percent of our line is thaw-and-serve, 8 percent is frozen dough and the remainder, for example the lava cake, is fully baked and has to be reheated,” Sears says.

Including croissants, chocolate lava cakes, crème brûlée and mousse cakes, Galaxy makes about 100,000 individual desserts and pastries per day-a number that increases dramatically during the holiday season. It also can produce about 60,000 shot glasses of mousse per day.

In the mousse room, custom-designed double depositors can fill two different flavors of mousse consecutively, such as dark chocolate and milk chocolate, for improved efficiency. Once the plastic shot glasses are filled, white chocolate shavings are added by hand before the mousse-filled glasses enter the spiral-cooling tunnel in the packaging room.

Production expands

When Galaxy moved to Richmond in 2005, it rented 26,000 sq. ft. of a 104,000-sq.-ft. building. Six months later, it expanded to 36,000 sq. ft. One and a half years ago, the company added another 16,000 sq. ft., bringing the total to 52,000 sq. ft., which makes its current production area triple the size of its original facility in San Rafael. Still, Levitan anticipates further expansion. “We think when we're ready, our neighbors will be happy to share,” he says.

A $2.7 million investment by Pacific Community Ventures, a San Francisco firm that invests in companies that help provide economic gains and jobs in low-income communities, helped Galaxy with its most recent expansion.

Two new rack ovens were installed, bringing the total to six. The newer ovens cook more evenly than the old ones and use less gas, Charon notes. The facility already housed a 300-pallet freezer and a 50-pallet holding freezer, but a new 400-pallet freezer will allow for more rapid product turnover. A production room for croissants was built and specifically set up to streamline efficiency. Because 1-lb. sticks of butter must be individually wrapped and pressed before the lamination process begins, the room was designed so butter pressing can begin earlier in the process.

A new packaging room, housing four lines feeding into a spiral freezer with 90 ft. of conveyor, began operating last September, but not without some problems. “We certainly had a couple of hurdles in the fall,” Levitan says. “Right now, retail is growing faster than foodservice. As we've gone from foodservice to a higher number of packaged items, keeping up with that side of demand involves equipment. We had some growing pains trying to get everything packed, and pretty much ended up packaging 24/7.”

The new packaging equipment, in conjunction with some of the other capital improvements made, doubled the company's capacity, Levitan notes. “Without that, we wouldn't have been able to have all that growth,” Charon adds.