Who is ralphs owned by

Click here to follow election results! Ralphs Grocery Company operated primarily in Southern California and was founded in The company was a top donor of the ballot measure committee Yes on The measure appeared on the ballot on November 8, These results are automatically generated from Google. Ballotpedia does not curate or endorse these articles. What's on my ballot? Elections in How to vote How to run for office Ballot measures. Who represents me? President U. Ballotpedia features , encyclopedic articles written and curated by our professional staff of editors, writers, and researchers.

Click here to contact our editorial staff, and click here to report an error. Click here to contact us for media inquiries, and please donate here to support our continued expansion. Share this page Follow Ballotpedia. What's on your ballot? Jump to: navigation , search. In the company was incorporated as Ralphs Grocery Company, and two years later it launched a much larger branch store.

By , the Ralphs chain consisted of ten stores. The Ralphs brothers focused on modernizing these facilities, and home delivery service by horse-drawn wagons eventually made way for self-service and parking lots.

In the s, the Ralphs stores began featuring bakeries and creameries in their 25 stores; the s would bring delicatessens and other in-store conveniences. A new generation of Ralphs took over the company after its founder, George Ralphs, died, and by the middle of the century the family had made Ralphs one of the top grocers in the state. The company focused on marketing themselves as a high quality food retailer, but it was equally dedicated to keeping prices competitive, a combination which helped bring the number of Ralphs locations to over stores by the s.

By the s, the company's growth was strong enough to attract the attention of a national retail giant, which believed Ralphs was ready, with the right backing, to reach beyond the confines of a family-owned business. After steadily expanding throughout the decade, Ralphs was approached in by Cincinnati-based Federated Department Stores, one of the largest grocery chain store owners in the country.

Federated offered to buy the company from the Ralphs family, which had run the business from its inception. By the time Federated entered into negotiations with Ralphs, the family was ready to unload what had evolved into much more than a mom-and-pop operation.

Ralphs operated well under its new parent company, with the small but vibrant chain maintaining a forceful and steady presence in the rapidly growing Los Angeles region. Throughout the s and early part of the s Federated ran Ralphs smoothly and quietly, and the chain remained centered exclusively in Southern California, with little plan for national or statewide growth.

Nevertheless, Ralphs was influential in the industry; the company was among the first to introduce checkout stations with laser price scanners. After about a decade under Federated, Ralphs had fresh life breathed into it with the arrival of a new and energetic CEO, a man who had been devoted to work within the grocery industry since his childhood.

Byron Allumbaugh was appointed CEO of Ralphs in , after having spent two decades working in almost every behind-the-scenes department of the company.

Allumbaugh began his career in the food retail industry at the age of 12, when he went to work during World War II at his local grocer's meat department. From then on, Allumbaugh spent most of his time working in produce stores, and by college age had dropped out of school to devote himself to the industry full time.

Allumbaugh joined Ralphs in , already a seasoned, knowledgeable executive, and when the company began looking around for a new CEO in the late s, Allumbaugh was the natural choice. He was universally liked by the company, and he aided sales by personally spending a certain amount of time each week on the floor, hearing customer complaints and preferences, and generally getting a sense of what was and was not working.

As much as Allumbaugh was appreciated by his employees, however, the CEO's ambitions differed from those of his company's parent in a fundamental sense; he wanted no less than the statewide, and, eventually, national expansion of Ralphs Grocery. In the middle of the s parent company Federated became vulnerable to a growing number of competitors taking advantage of the new corporate trend of mergers and consolidations.

A specific threat came from a Canadian company, Campeau Corporation, which during the s had set its sights on acquiring its powerful rival from the south. In the midst of this ordeal, in order to stave off the mounting debt the company had accrued from fighting Campeau's takeover, Federated put some of its more lucrative companies up for sale, among them Ralphs Grocery.

It was at this time that Ralphs faced the most challenging threat to not only the company's success, but its very existence. When the chain was put on the market, several of Ralphs competitors, such as the California-based Lucky and American Stores, came forward with offers. Therefore, when Campeau finally prevailed in its takeover of Federated, Ralphs was to be only partly owned by the Canadian corporation and was able to maintain a significant amount of independence via the Allumbaugh shares.

Had Allumbaugh failed to buoy his fellow officers to fight for the company, Ralphs in all likelihood would have wound up either a wholly owned subsidiary of Campeau, which eventually filed for bankruptcy, or a nameless addition to the operations of one of its competitors. Ralphs Grocery came out of its struggles in the late s with its name and management intact, but the battle had cost the company dearly in terms of financial sacrifice.

Allumbaugh, who had seen his company grow five times over during his year tenure, was determined to bring Ralphs out of the red, and proceeded to shut down or relocate some of the chain's less lucrative sites. Despite the company's setback, however, Allumbaugh and his team had set a stable groundwork for Ralphs, of a sort which would ensure the company's survival during just such a difficult time.

The company had kept up with or been ahead of technological trends in the field, and had maintained a good reputation for fine produce and low prices. Most of the stores were cost-efficient, particularly in their use of automated systems, and were well prepared to make a financial comeback in the early s.

Campeau's takeover had slowed the company's goal of expanding beyond its Southern California center and had forced Ralphs to focus on strengthening its existing stores. With wise managerial guidance, Ralphs in the early part of the s slowly began to make a comeback despite its own recent misfortunes and California's overall flat economy.

The renewed growth of the company was noticed by one of Ralphs' greatly visible cohorts, the highly successful company FoodLess, located in Northern California.

At the time, FoodLess was larger and more profitable than Ralphs and was owned and funded by the huge Yucaipa Companies, which operated several chain companies around the country. In , only a few years after Ralphs' flirtation with disaster, FoodLess approached the company with a friendly merger proposition. The idea was the brainchild of Yucaipa's charismatic and eccentric leader Ronald Burkle. Burkle was known not only in the grocery industry, but throughout the industry of Hollywood as well, as a man devoted to high-profile parties and collecting famous mansions; certainly somewhat of an aberration in the staid field of food retail.

Already in possession of the Midwest's Dominick's Finer Foods, as well as the hugely successful Smith Food and Drug Centers, Burkle was looking for ways in which to increase his profits on the West Coast, and a union between FoodLess and Ralphs seemed the perfect way to accomplish such a goal. Burkle differed from Allumbaugh in several ways, the most noticeable of which was the former's high-profile status within California's business and political community.