Progress 2013 Ag & Industry

Agriculture & industry

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Double the tatersA Q&A with Chad Vogt of Mrs. Gerry’sBy Sarah Stultz

Albert Lea-based Mrs. Gerry’s Kitchen is nearing the completion of its new 37,000-square-foot expansion.

By this summer, the company is on track to double its potato-processing capacity and increase its cold and dry storage capabilities.

The Tribune sat down with Chad Vogt, Mrs. Gerry’s vice president and director of purchasing, to talk about the history of the company and its recent expansion.

Q: Mrs. Gerry’s has been in opera-tion since 1973. Can you tell us a little about how it got started? What were the goals for the company when it first began?

A: In 1973, Mr. Jerry Vogt was selling salads on his Schweigert meat route to complement his meat — some cheeses, different products and one of them was the line of salads. The lady who made those salads was going to retire, so he came to Mrs. Gerry Vogt and said, ‘Would you make salads for me? And you have until tomorrow to give me answer.’ So they went to bed that night. They both prayed about it, and when they woke up in the morn-ing, they felt a peace that they should start something, that they should start making salads.

They started in the kitchen of their home. At the time Gerry had a 5-year-old, a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old in the house.

They quickly grew out of the house-hold kitchen, and they bought a place on Seventh Street, a 7,000-square foot building on the south side of town.

Their first employees were her par-ents, Al and Betty Siemer, and their first year they sold 70,000 pounds.

In 1978, they moved to the Northaire Industrial Park. Since then, this is the sixth addition. 4P. 5

Facts about the expansionCompany starts small

Gerry and Jerry Vogt started Mrs. Gerry’s Kitchen in 1973 in a 1,100-square foot building. Mrs. Gerry’s produced 70,000 pounds of three salads the first year. Production volume since has increased to 25 mil-lion pounds per year.

Make way for more potato processing

The expansion adds an additional 37,000-square feet to the company’s already existing 85,000-square foot manufacturing facility. It will double the potato-processing capacity and provide additional cold storage.

Employees to increase

With the expansion, Mrs. Gerry’s anticipates hiring an additional five to 10 employees, up from the 140 permanent employees already at the site.

Dozens of foods being offered

The company supplies more than 100 varieties of salads, dips, entrees and mashed potatoes to retail and food service customers in 17 states. Its most popular product is its ready-to-eat mashed potatoes.

Mashed potatoes are No. 1

For 38 years, Mrs. Gerry’s original potato salad was the No. 1 product for the company, but in 2012 that was surpassed by the sales of mashed potatoes.

Brandi Hagenchad Vogt is the vice president and director of purchasing for Mrs. gerry’s Kitchen. the compa-ny is based in Albert Lea at 2110 y.H. Hanson Ave. and its process-ing plant is at the same location. the company is in the second phase of expanding that plant.

Freeborn County labor market by the numbersdescription Period data county rankPopulation 2011 31,172 35Population 2011 -83 35Working age (18-64) 2001-2011 average 58.1% 55Population over 24 with diploma 2007-2011 average 87.3% 69Pop. speaks English less than “very well” 2007-2011 average 2.3% 21Labor force December 2012 16,482 35Per capita income 2007-2011 average $24,409 53Annual average employment 2011 12,290 34Quarter average employment 2nd Q 2012 12,308 34Employment change from prior year 2nd Q 2012 -204Mean travel time to work 2007-2011 average 18 min. 61Unemployed December 2012 920 50Unemployment rate December 2012 5.6% 44Pop. below poverty 2007-2011 average 11% 35Initial claims for unemployment insurance December 2012 194 41Initial claims change from prior year December 2012 -14% 13Average weekly wage (see chart) 2011 $643 42

Source: Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development

Average annual weekly wage

green: Minnesotared: Southeast Minnesota

Blue: Freeborn County

Source: DEED quarterly census of employment

and wages

2 3 4 6

Page 2 • Albert Lea Tribune • Sunday, February 24, 2013 • PROGRESS 2013

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Kelli LagesonPhil Tennis stands near a county ditch north of Hayward. Tennis retired in December from his part-time post as county ditch inspector after 19 years.

Brandi HagenTony Segura stands in the McDonald’s near the Interstate 90 exit for Bridge Avenue. Segura has been an employee of the company since he was 15. He now manages the restaurant.

Brandi HagenDanielle Wertman stands in her home amongst pieces she has crocheted. She sells her handmade items over the Internet.

Tim EngstromGene Pederson leans on the truck he used to operate and maintain. He retired last May after 44 years work-ing for Freeborn-Mower Cooperative Services.

Portraits of you taken by the Tribune staff

Lynn Scheevel, left, and Afton Wa-cholz are athletic trainers for Albert Lea High School. According to the women, it is rare for a school to have more than one.Brandi Hagen

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Technology is chang-ing farm machinery, which in turn is chang-ing farming.

Al Anderson at Ag Power Enterprises in Hollandale, a John Deere dealership, has seen fewer farmers do-ing the work that used to be done by many more farmers when he started working at the dealer-ship in 1973. Updates to tractors and combines, as well as all the other ag machinery, have made it possible for people to do more in less time.

“Farmers who sur-vived specialized in something,” Anderson said.

He remembers 38 operations, mostly vegetable farmers, in the Hollandale area when he came to the dealership. Now there are three. In the 1970s, having 500 acres was considered a lot. Now most crop farmers in Freeborn County manage 1,200 to 1,500 acres.

There are many more pieces of machinery available to farmers now, too. Anderson said in the ’70s there were a handful of tractors made by John Deere, and now the dealership offers 93 kinds of tractors, with various options.

“Everything just got bigger,” Anderson said.

And with that, the price increased.

Anderson said John Deere tractors in the 1970s cost around $15,000; now some of the tractors cost $200,000. Combine

prices also dramati-cally increased; in the ’70s a combine could cost $30,000, and now Anderson said a com-bine “with all the bells and whistles” could be as much as $800,000.

So why the cost increase? Machinery now offers so much more innovation and convenience.

The big innovation in the 1970s was the en-closed cab, which offered farmers relief from dust and the option of heat-ing and air conditioning. Nowadays, there are the changes a customer would expect, like in-creased horsepower and better fuel efficiency, but there’s also so much more technology avail-able to farmers. Techni-cians and parts and sales employees have to take continuing John Deere education courses online just to keep up with all the new technology.

“We can help custom-ers during planting season with fertilizer application,” Anderson said. “We can also moni-tor yields and moisture which helps them select corn varieties for the years to come.”

John Deere also offers a service called JDLink, which lets farmers and their local dealership monitor the piece of ma-chinery from an iPhone or computer. The service will alert the farmer and the dealership if some-thing goes wrong, like an alternator failing or if there is low oil pressure. Anderson said the deal-ership already has used the service to find out

about issues, and then technicians found the machinery using GPS to get to the farm and fix it.

JDLink also measures how many hours the tractor has run, and it also measures how many hours the tractor has run idling, or run at 70 percent and so on. Large-operation farmers with multiple pieces of machinery can use the service to set parame-ters for their employees so that the tractor can only run from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. or over a certain number of acres. An-derson said he doesn’t know of any farmers locally who do this, but it is an option.

Another innovation Anderson is excited about is how some of the more advanced machin-ery can drive themselves. If a tractor or combine knows the GPS coordi-nates of the field, a farm-er can sit in the cab with no hands on the wheel and the machine will steer itself. The classic image of a farmer on a tractor steering forward while looking backward is fading away.

Also, the combine can “call” a tractor via GPS to come alongside it pulling a grain cart so it can col-lect the crop, using tech-nology John Deere calls implement sync. Ander-son said while there’s still a person in the tractor for safety reasons, that the combine has complete control of driving the tractor.

“There’s a lot of in-novation that a lot of people aren’t aware of,” Anderson said.

This brand new trac-tor is a 6115D, with 115 horsepower.

Bigger machines, Bigger farms

Kelli Lageson, Stacey BahrThis tractor is a brand new John Deere 8335R. It has 335 horsepower. This tractor is outfitted with a rock box on the front, which are locally made in Emmons.


By Sarah Stultz

The once-shuttered biod-iesel plant near Glenville has come a long way in the last few years.

By the end of this summer, the Renewable Energy Group Inc. plant will be outfitted with more than $20 million in upgrades.

The upgrades will allow the 30-million-gallons-a-year facility to make diesel from low-grade fats, oils and other natural resources that would normally take longer to refine, rather than soybean

oil and other types of refined materials.

REG-Albert Lea Plant Manager Bryan Christjansen said the facility will have a fatty acid stripper, which allows the company to take any feedstock that is normally high in fatty acid, strip that fatty acid off of it and then produce biodiesel with what is left over.

It will also have new distil-lation units in place that will produce a cleaner biodiesel than what can be manufac-tured there today, he said.

“To the best of my knowl-

edge, no other facility will have this combination,” Christjansen said. “Some have one or the other, but we’ll have the combination of both.”

There will also be a new gas line, cooling towers and fuel tanks, among other upgrades.

“This plant was originally built for just soybean oil,” he said. “Now we’re going to be able to do a lot more variety.”

REG bought the plant in the summer of 2011 after SoyMor Biodiesel LLC suspended pro-duction in 2008 due to high prices for soybean oil.

The plant started up again in 2011, and construction began in August 2012.

Christjansen said there are currently 22 employees with additional staff expected after the upgrades are completed. Many of the current employ-ees were SoyMor employees who had been laid off.

Three major contractors have been hired for the con-struction: Todd & Sargent of Ames, Iowa; Interstates Con-trol Systems of Sioux Falls, S.D., and the Baker Group of Des Moines.

He said he expected as many as 60 workers to be working on the project by the end of February.

1There is a growing acceptance of biodiesel

Christjansen said the demand for biodiesel across the country is increasing.

Some states are already requiring a 10 percent biod-iesel blend in diesel fuel, and in 2014 Minnesota will join the group, he said.

Currently, the state mandates diesel fuel to contain at least 5 percent biodiesel.

Christjansen said it also helps that biodiesel has differ-ent markets other than just for fuel. It can also be used as a substitute for heating oil.

2Biodiesel receives tax credits

Christjansen said biodiesel blenders receive a federal $1 per gallon tax credit, though there are not state tax credits that apply.

He said this helps the industry grow.The federal credit was extended in a vote to avoid a

fiscal cliff in January by Congress and President Barack Obama.

In a statement after the vote, REG President and CEO Daniel Oh said he was thankful for the support the biodiesel industry received through the reinstatement of the credit.

“This tax credit provides certainty for our petroleum distributor customers and, in turn, market stability for commercial biodiesel producers like us,” Oh said.

3The facility is owned by REG

Christjansen said it helps the local facility’s success to be a part of the largest distributor and manufacturer of biodiesel in the country.

Renewable Energy Group Inc. was formed in 2006 as an independent corporation and is headquartered in Ames, Iowa.

It has more than 225 million gallons of annual produc-tion capacity at seven biorefineries across the country. Four more plants are yet to be completed.

Christjansen said having the capability to procure the feedstock and sell the biodiesel with several other facili-ties also adds to the success.

Why the success of the local biodiesel plant?

It’s back up, running and expanding

Sarah StultzFour contractors work on a steel beam in early February as part of an upgrade to the Renewable Energy Group Inc. facility near Glenville.

Contractors work to install distillation units at the REG biod-iesel plant a mile west of Glenville.

A biodiesel plant sat vacant from 2008 to 20121; now people are back to work and upgrades are planned

Contractors work in early February to install more than $20 million in upgrades to the Renewable Energy Group Inc. facility in Glenville. One upgrade is the addition of a fatty acid stripper, seen in center.

The biodiesel industry is not just about refining soybean oil anymore

With more than 225 million gallons of owned or operated annual production capacity at biorefineries across the country, Ames, Iowa-based Renewable Energy Group Inc. is the lead-ing North American biodiesel producer.

It has the following biodiesel plants:• REG Albert Lea near Glenville• REG Houston in Seabrook, Texas

• REG Danville in Danville, Ill.• REG New Boston in New Boston, Texas• REG Newton in Newton, Ill. • REG Ralston in Ralston, Iowa• REG Seneca in Seneca, Ill. The following biorefineries have yet to be completed: • REG Atlanta in Ellenwood, Ga.• REG Clovis in Clovis, N.M.• REG Emporia in Emporia, Kan.• REG New Orleans in St. Rose, La.

About REG

Enjoy the Silence.

TribuneAlbert Lea


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Q: Did they antici-pate the company was going to take off like this?

A: No, not at all. Their first custom-

ers were the Schweigert sales people. My dad was one of the Sch-weigert drivers, and so he went around and got other drivers to buy in on this. Then they landed SuperValu, a distributor out of the Minneapolis market, and then it really started to grow.

Other distributors started to come on periodically, and it just kept growing and growing. Really it came down to that they were discovering that a qual-ity ready-made salad could be produced for them without making it in the kitchen and they could sell it on the store shelves. That’s what re-ally drove the sales was the quality.

Q: When did the development of the mashed potatoes come in?

A: That came about in 2005. Our CEO from England, Alan Oliver, was over in England and visited a manufacturer that did mashed pota-toes and came back with that idea that we could do something similar. That was kind of the birth of that.

We started finding what was out there in the market, who was making mashed po-tatoes and what we wanted to offer. What was the best product out there? We wanted to at least match it, if not out do it. And we outdid it. There’s no doubt about it.

Q: Is that your top-selling product?

A: It is. The original potato

salad was my grand-mother’s recipe. That was the No. 1-selling item for 38 years, and last year premium mashed potatoes sur-passed that product as No. 1. That’s really why

we did our expansion. We were growing at such a pace we could not keep up with it. We had to expand to make room for more processing, and thus more storage to the north and opening up the south for more processing.

Q: Do you have ad-ditional contracts that you are expanding for, or are you expanding some of your existing contracts?

A: One of the bottle-necks for us was cold storage, and the fact that our potato processing of mashed potatoes con-tinued to increase year upon year forced us to do something different.

It wasn’t necessarily this new customer or that new customer; it’s all the sales increasing year after year.

Sales continue to in-crease is the bottom line. We get new customers all the time.

Q: Why did the

company decide to do it all here as opposed to somewhere else?

A: It’s a great com-munity. Albert Lea has been very helpful, in being an asset to us. We think this is a great com-munity to not only raise families but employ people. We wanted to do everything we could to keep it here, and that’s why we’re here.

Q: You ended up receiving help from the city? Did you get any other help?

A: We received a TIF, tax increment financing, and we received a low-interest loan from the USDA Ru-ral Development Fund for $1 million.

Q: What was the total cost of the whole project?

A: I’d prefer not to say.

Q: Where are you at with the expansion?

What has been done and what is still left to be done?

A: The shell is up. The dry storage aspect of the addition is full, and we’re waiting for our refrigeration building to the east to get done so we can cool it down, put refrigerant in there, and then move finished goods in there.

We’re into Phase 2 of the project, where we’re redesigning the interior of the existing plant to accommodate addi-tional potato-processing equipment. We’re basi-cally redesigning to ac-commodate more potato production.

The bottleneck was cold storage. Unless we alleviated that pressure, we couldn’t redesign to accommodate more processing.

Q: What’s the time-line for when everything is going to be done?

A: Probably August of 2013. That’s when

we’ll have cold storage up, potato processing go-ing, a new freezer, double our finished-goods cooler and then just some tweaks in production.

Q: When will you be adding the new employees?

A: The additional employees will gradually happen as we get a feel for how the new process-ing is going to operate. They will be added here and there as needed.

Q: How does every-one in the company feel about the expansion?

A: The employees have been great. They’ve stood behind us and em-braced this whole thing. We’re supplying more jobs to the community.

It’s been a great pro-cess, a lot of work.

Q: Looking back since 1973, what do you think about how far the company has come since it started?

A: It’s phenomenal. What a success story she’s had, and all the glory to God because he has had his hand on this business from the beginning. It’s just been a great success story for this community, and we hope it continues for many years to come.

Q: You credit the success you’ve had to God. Can you explain that more?

A: It started in the beginning when my dad came home to my mom. The first thing they did when they went to bed, they said we need to pray about this and we need to sense that God is leading this if we’re going to be successful. From the beginning we’ve relied upon God’s hand, and we still do to this day. God is a very important part of this company, and we feel without his blessing on it, it would not be where it’s at today.

The expansion of Mrs. Gerry’s, shown here, is on the north side of the building. It adds 37,000 square feet to the plant.

Brandi HagenMrs. Gerry’s Kitchen has expanded from the kitchen of Gerry Vogt to an entire plant at 2110 Y.H. Hanson Ave.

Continued from Page 1

A contract with SuperValu helped to grow company in early days

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Tim Engstrom, Stacey BahrJensales owner Paul Jensen is selling farm implement manuals over the Internet in more ways than one. Above is his work desk, but the Tribune placed a photo of him in front of nondigitized manuals into the computer screen.

By Tim Engstrom

Manchester-based Jensales isn’t just about selling tractor manuals anymore. The company has ventured into Inter-net commerce, sales of tractor parts and direct-to-garment printing, and all three have been good for business.

Owner Paul Jensen figured sales over the In-ternet in general would be a big hit in rural areas, which is where most of the customers who buy parts manuals, operator manuals and service manuals for older tractors and other aging farm equipment reside. After all, rural folks have to travel farther to buy

products they use every day. However, it took longer than he expected, which he said was due to rural residents typically not being early adopters of technology.

That has changed in the last three or four years, he said. Many sellers of ag equipment have increased their web presence.

Jensales invested labor and money into developing an online presence, with a website capable of e-commerce and an intuitive user experience. As a result, the company saw a 300 percent increase in sales in 2012.

Jensen said part of the reason is the website but

part of it is the company partnering with larger companies that sell parts for ag machinery. When parts are sold for old tractors, customers often request a manual. “Manuals are like fries,” Jensen said. “People buy a part and get asked, ‘Would you like a manual with that?’”

The parts companies can sell manuals, pro-vide the order to Jen-sales, and it ships to the customers.

Likewise, when cus-tomers buy manuals, they often are seeking parts, too, Jensales in 2013 intends to increase its sale of parts through the website and tele-phone, even though4P. 7

Jensales ventures into e-commerce


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requested parts are not in the building. Jensales shoots the order over to the correct parts com-pany, and that company ships the part to the customer.

“It’s a symbiotic rela-tionship,” Jensen said. “They sell our manuals, and we sell their parts.”

Jensen said being a seller of parts manuals gives Jensales a custom-er-service advantage that often parts guys don’t have.

“The root of the story is we have always been asked for parts,” he said.

He told an anecdote of a man in the Canadian province of Saskatch-ewan who had been told by his local implement dealer that the part he sought didn’t exist. The man simply couldn’t find the right term to de-scribe the part. He tried three other parts places and got nothing.

The man finally called Jensales, which found the part number in a Saab-Scania manual. Once a part number is discovered, finding the part becomes much easier. Jensales ordered the part through Tom’s Agri Diesel in Harlan, Iowa, which shipped the part — an internal clutch

bushing — directly to Saskatchewan.

“We never had the part on site, but we were the only ones who could find what he needed,” Jensen said.

Jensales has access to sell more than 100,000 parts, he said, but it maintains an inventory of about 1,000 parts in Manchester — “1 percent of what we offer,” he said.

That includes a store-front with collectibles such as tractor lights, steering wheels and nameplates that can double as paperweights.

Online sales likely will continue to rise in 2013, thanks to Amazon.

Even though many companies have their own websites with the ability to sell prod-ucts, they also will sell their goods on Amazon because, as Jensen noted, customers trust Amazon.

However, anyone who has ordered books on Amazon knows users like to see the first few pages. What will they be getting? Jensales is tackling the gargantuan task of getting that ac-complished. After all, it cannot just be title pages. A human must look at the digital ver-sions of the manuals and

declare what users find worthy, Jensen said.

Jensen also is looking at eBay, which is chang-ing its model to being more of a general com-merce site and less of an auction site.

The third area where Jensales has expanded is direct-to-garment print-ing. He said Jensales can print on anything made of cotton — T-shirts, towels, rags, canvas and so on — almost like how a computer prints to a printer. There is no set-up fee like with silk-screens, and it can print on any color, which often was a limitation of high-heat transfers (iron-ons).

The ink, he said, bonds to the threads so the image stands up well over time — no crack-ing or peeling. He said Jensales is the only com-pany in the region doing direct-to-garment print-ing. The closest competi-tor is in Rochester.

One popular product, Jensen, has been cus-tom rags. Farmers like to carry a rag in their overalls, and Jensales makes them with logos of companies such as International Harvester, Massey-Ferguson, Cat-erpiller, Allis-Chalmers and John Deere.

Tim EngstromA direct-to-garment printing machine enables Jensales to print cherished agri-culture implement logos on shop rags. Paul Jensen said this has been a popular gift item for fathers and grandfathers.

Jensales sells thousands of parts it doesn’t have in stock, but it does have about 1,000 parts in stock. Some of them are for sale in a little store at the front entrace. This includes tractor headlights, steering wheels, nameplates that can double as paper weights and other classic farm pieces.

Need gauges from an old Oliver tractor? Jensales has them.

Continued from Page 6

Printing on garments is changing


HARTLAND 601 N. Broadway 507-845-2233 ALBERT LEA 1452 W. Main 507-373-1945 FREEBORN 214 5th Street 507-863-2371

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Progress 2013 Ag & Industry