Dan and Angie Bastian of Angie’s Artisan Treats—the parent company of Angie’s Kettle Corn—are pop artists. They have turned ordinary, slightly sweet and salty kettle corn into an artistic subject, a 180-employee North Mankato manufacturing facility into a painter’s palette, and grocery store shelves into a consumer canvas. And a ravenous public devours this pop art.
Doug Anderson lucked into it. He would be first to tell you. But nearly all businesspeople luck into opportunity. Connect Business Magazine over its 17-year history has featured hundreds of businesspeople that happened to be in the right place at the right time, including some of the more financially flourishing, such as Bill Bresnan, Tom Rosen, and Glen Taylor.
Business Person of the Year 2010 – Winner
Tourists enjoying kitschy oddities often travel to Minnesota’s Lac qui Parle County and its 1,200-population county seat, Madison, known as the “Lutefisk Capital of the United States.”
He was on the precipice. It was December 2004. The antagonistic managers of his ten bus companies had just attempted a bloodless coup d’etat. Their set of demands included having Floyd Palmer relinquish control over the day-to-day management of the school bus company he had owned and managed since 1974.
You made it through Election 2008. You survived the senatorial recount—oh, is that another eighteen missing ballots under my desk? You need something more relaxing. Why not continue perusing the January issue of Connect Business Magazine? So buckle your seat belts and away we go……….. First, we can’t say it enough. Our heartfelt thanks go [...]
North Mankato’s Fred Lutz likes flyin’ high in the western sky in his Beechcraft 33 Bonanza, tail flaps up, headset on, sippin’ straight 7UP through a cocktail straw. It’s another ideal Saturday afternoon for a businessman who still has Uncola coursing through his veins. His 7UP-green Lincoln LS parked next to the green hangar at Mankato Airport has “UNCOLA” plates; and his Beechcraft 33 the registration number “N77UP.” Old allegiances die hard.
Lutz was a high-profile, national figure in the soft drink industry in the ’70s and early ’80s. He served as national president of the 7UP Bottlers Association and also the Dr Pepper Bottlers Association, and as state president of the Minn. Soft Drink Association. And he lobbied Capitol Hill as a board member of the National Soft Drink Association.
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