Beltsville-based company counts on its U.S. location to win federal

Daily Record, The (Baltimore), Apr 2, 2004 by Kathleen Johnston Jarboe

From a business standpoint, it's a family and I'm the patriarch of the family, says Gantt as he sits in an empty office after walking through the center. I want everyone to feel positive and like a family.

He repeats the belief while addressing a luncheon crowd during the center's grand opening.

Spherix sees itself as a family, he says. We're really dedicated more than ever to getting involved in the community.

About 40 employees and local government officials make up the audience. Cumberland's mayor cut the ribbon earlier in the morning.

A wispy, blonde 20-year-old with her hair tied in a knot agrees. You can see her tongue-ring when she laughs.

Yeah [we're like a family]. We drive each other nuts like family. We give each other nicknames like a family, says Susan Kelly before revealing that the woman next to her is also known as hag and mom.

Sweets for the sweet

Still Gantt hasn't ignored the other half of the company - sugar. Spherix's founder and chairman worked years to develop the sugar substitute that looked and tasted like the product on grocery shelves but had fewer calories. The call-center side only started to support his research and development.

A storage room in Spherix's Beltsville location holds the future of the company. There on the corner of an almost 60-foot-long shelf, sits a one ton stack of 55-pound bags of the sugar. The rest of the shelf is occupied by a non-toxic fly larvae killer that failed to bring in revenue.

Spherix has needed the shipment for years so it could start marketing it to non-food manufacturers who might put it in their products.

But the shipment was tied up in a licensing dispute with Arla, the Danish dairy company that initially purchased the rights to make tagatose when few other bidders would give Spherix a reasonable price.

Years had passed and Arla had yet to start marketing the product to food manufactures.

Spherix claimed it was missing out on royalties that would soon expire.

The disagreement ended up in a European arbitration court, only further delaying production.

When Gantt took the role of CEO, he knew settling the argument was paramount. Both companies already had spent $1 million in legal fees and would likely spend more and risk losing the argument altogether.

I said, 'look, it doesn't make sense - and I would like to offer a compromise,' Gantt said. He traveled with his new wife to England in the middle of their honeymoon to broker the deal when no other date would suffice.

The first pallet of sugar sitting in the warehouse represents the result of the compromise - a stable source of the sugar via Arla's German partner so Spherix can sell it to the non-food market.

The deal with Arla left to Spherix the sole rights to sell the sugar to mouthwash, toothpaste and other non-food manufacturers interested in improving their products. Naturlose, the sugar's name for the non-food market, can improve the taste of such products without stimulating the bacteria that produce cavities, the company claims.

With an agreement in hand, Gantt could justify hiring a new research and development lead to help the company place the sugar in non-food products in January.