2007 Minnesota Business Hall of Fame

When Don Helgeson first saw Gold’n Plump chickens wearing tiny helmets and parachuting out of airplanes, he thought “Uh-oh.”

“I thought it was too violent, too militaristic,” he says of his company’s past ad campaign. “I almost put the squash on it!” In the end, he decided to trust the ads’ creators, Fallon McElligott Rice. “That was more than 20 years ago, and people still talk about those TV commercials,” he says with a laugh.

They helped make his company—the Upper Midwest’s first producer of fresh, processed chicken—into the region’s largest. St. Cloud–based Gold’n Plump has 1,500 employees, three production plants, two hatcheries, and two feed mills. It processes nearly 6 million pounds of chicken a week and generates more than $200 million in annual sales. At 79, Helgeson remains president and chairman of the board.

His father, E. M. Helgeson, founded St. Cloud Hatcheries in 1926 in a downtown livery stable. Back then, most eggs were hatched on family farms, and the process was subject to the whims of nature. E. M.’s incubators allowed for the controlled hatching of vast numbers of eggs, and he sold the day-old chicks by mail order. It was an innovative and profitable business. In the 1930s, he ran a contest to give it a more marketable name. The winner got $25; his business got an identity that emphasized the chicks’ strong constitutions: Jack Frost Hatchery.

His son Don started working there at age 11, moving eggs from cases to incubator trays for $1 a day. By the end of high school, he was “blood testing” hens for disease—scrambling through the coops to catch flapping birds, hanging them upside down on a rack, and drawing blood samples from their wings. “It was kind of a messy job,” he says.

After a stint in the Army and graduating from Macalester College, he took two quarters of business courses at the University of Minnesota and came home to St. Cloud in 1951. He was ready to go to work—but his father was ready to sell out. Demand for chicken had dropped sharply after World War II, and E. M. didn’t see much future in the hatchery business. Meanwhile, Liberty Loan (later Liberty Savings Bank of St. Cloud), a subsidiary he’d started in the early ’30s to help farmers finance their chick purchases, was thriving as GIs returned from the war and borrowed money to put down roots. He concentrated on that and sold Jack Frost to his sons, Don (CEO) and Jerry (head of marketing).

Don Helgeson quickly spent $10,000 on a farm so he could breed for broiler chicks. The broiler industry was new, and companies in Arkansas, Delaware, Virginia, and Maryland were raising broilers and shipping their processed chicken to the Midwest. Long-distance transport took its toll, though, and Helgeson saw an opportunity to provide fresher, better-tasting broilers to Minnesota. In 1955, Jack Frost entered into a joint venture with a meat-processor in Cold Spring and began producing fresh, tray-pack chicken.

“We used a lot of imagination and creativity in the early days,” Helgeson says. “It was a challenge to keep the business going, keep an even flow of product, keep everyone happy. The business wasn’t as well formulated as it is today.”

To make it run smoothly, he developed lasting relationships with the farmers who raised his broilers on contract. “The farmers just didn’t want to take on risk,” he recalls. “So we developed a program where we would take the risk and they would get paid just for raising the birds. People in the industry said, ‘You’re crazy! You can’t trust those guys!’ But we picked our people very carefully. Most of them were second-generation German farmers who plowed a furrow straight because that’s the only way you do it. We took them on as partners, and they responded as partners.”

Mike Helgeson, Don’s son and the company’s current CEO, says, “We have long-term contracts with about 250 grower families in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and many of them are third generation. We still use the contract model my father developed back in the ’60s.”