Ben Pieser’s American-born grandfather settled on the shores of Turtle Lake, Wisconsin, in the late 1800s, and ultimately started a Ford dealership there. He later owned Royal Food Market in Mankato. Ben’s father Dick, who had worked at Royal Food Market after graduating from Mankato High School, followed in his father’s footsteps by cofounding New Ulm Furniture in 1945. And finally, Ben Pieser, the current owner, has helped grow New Ulm Furniture into “The Furniture Giant.”
A simple sandwich launched Najwa Massad’s career.
She operates Najwa’s Catering in Mankato, providing everything from box lunches to sit-down dinners, serving as few as five and as many as 2,500. She caters weddings, funerals, anniversaries and company events ranging from in-office lunches to picnics and parties. Massad has been the exclusive caterer for all events at the Midwest Wireless Civic Center since it opened in 1995.
Lowell Andreas helped cultivate Archer Daniels Midland Company into a $22 billion corporate wonder, and he did it by using the ol’ bean.
At 80, he’s an American business icon. In 1947, he and brother Dwayne purchased a little soybean processing plant in Mankato, renamed it Honeymead, and rehabbed it into the nation’s largest soybean plant of its type before selling out in the 1960s. Their success story could have ended there, with Lowell basking on a Florida beach, sipping iced tea through a bent straw, and playing endless rounds of golf on Bermuda grass. But it didn’t: he and Dwayne would invest their cash to reinvent American agriculture.
Capstone Press keeps exploding, Mankato may someday be known as the “Book Publishing” Capital of the Upper Midwest.”
You’re excused if you’ve never heard of Capstone Press. New owners coaxed it out of financially troubled obscurity in 1990, re-starting it with two employees and a vision.
You may never meet another married couple quite like Gene and Margo Hoffmann. Except for their wedding date – “It’s in 1964, I know that much,” claims Margo – neither know the important dates that most people would have memorized along life’s path, such as the year they began Nicollet South Bike Shop, or the year they purchased their rural Nicollet home, or the years they graduated from Mankato State. Even when pressed about her husband’s age, Margo had to fidget five or six seconds. “Fifty-nine, because he just had a birthday,” she says.
Brown Printing COO Tom Engdahl didn’t bring along to seat 7D his latest New England Journal of Medicine with the article on “Pulmonary Langerhans’-cell histiocytosis” – or for that matter, any other publication his company prints.
HELP WANTED: Immediate opening for marketing professional to spread word about neat stuff made by inventor/artisan/craftsman. Must make up for 30 years of lost sales. Call 507-278-4302.
Arnie Lillo never placed that ad. He’s more interested in conceptualizing and creating than in selling his creations. He holds three patents and passed up several others. But not one of his ideas put him on a road to fame and fortune, for a variety of reasons.
Listening to 70-year-old Lyle Stevermer talk about his company is like watching an inquisitive man trying to pencil in a Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle for the first time. He has lots of ideas, but doesn’t know where he will put them all.
Rep. Bob Gunther, like Mr. Whipple, enjoys squeezing the Charmin — and periodically poking a finger into the Pillsbury doughboy’s tummy. In fact, his calloused hands and fingers are into squeezing and poking nearly everything.
Ask 100 people outside his hometown of Fairmont and they will describe Gunther’s poking and squeezing 100 different ways. The grocery industry leans heavily on his savvy: he co-owns Gunther’s Foods in Fairmont and Elmore, and understands grocery issues in minute detail. To corporate executives he’s the razor-sharp yet unassuming Republican point man on many job training and workforce development issues.
