Connect Business Magazine

Lora Rahe is barefoot, her blue jeans rolled an inch above her ankles. A trail of wet footprints follows her from the side door of her New Ulm business to the spot where she now stands, talking happily with one of her favorite customers.

Dan Gislason digs the Icelandic countryside. It’s a winter wonderland of crystal-clean waterfalls and gargantuan glaciers, an arctic canvas of white and lipstick red homes nestled against pastel-green Ansel Adams ridges. Iceland is a cornucopia of mentally stimulating sights and refreshing sounds—the rushing waterfall, the flapping gull, the gentle spring wind melting ice. Rural Iceland would have been a natural fit for Dan today if his ancestors hadn’t left there in the late 1800s.

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.”

At night when most southern Minnesota businessmen are snoring loudly and dreaming of sugar plum profits, New Ulm native Jon Gasner is roaring his machine across a Wal-Mart parking lot, gulping hot java, and trying to stay awake by shoulder shimmying to Alabama and Alan Jackson. Other than being a fastidious neatnik, buying a $35,000 vacuum sweeper in 1998 to begin a new business with no customers, purchasing the old UPS facility with no renters, and circumnavigating a messy divorce in 2001, Gasner’s story has little shine.

Forty-year-old Sharron Moss-Higham manages Kraft Foods’ largest North American process cheese plant — and perhaps the world’s largest. It is 350,000 sq. ft. of aged cheddar cheese and 950 employees wearing hair nets. All those 22-ton trailers rumbling out of New Ulm to distribution points all over are trying to satisfy America’s long-standing hunger for Kraft process (or “processed”) cheese, the nation’s fourth bestselling product line in grocery stores. This year Kraft-New Ulm alone will manufacture and ship billions of Kraft process cheese slices, all of America’s Handi-Snacks, and nearly all the nation’s Velveeta, the kitschy cheese loaf adored by millions.

Nancy Fogelberg seems a bit taken aback when people credit her with turning around what was once a prodigal company, New Ulm’s American Artstone, now a $4.5 million, 50-employee, Midwest leader in architectural pre-cast concrete. She gives all the credit for the turnaround to her employees.