Category: columns-business

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One Sole At A Time

By Michael Zimny

Chad Scoular repairs boots and other leather goods inside a small shop in downtown Rapid City.

Chad Scoular is making a go of it in an endangered trade — shoe repair. “In the fifties, there were six shops in this town [Rapid City]. Now there’s one, and that’s us,” Scoular says.”The closest one is Sheridan, Wyoming. The others [in the region] are Vermillion and Sioux Falls.

“It’s getting to be a throw-away society. It’s getting tough to fix things too. It’s almost cheaper to buy a new pair than to go get it fixed.”

Fortunately for him, there’s a particular type of footwear, common in this region, that people like to hold onto for a while.

“Our primary business is cowboy boots. That’s what we love to do,” he says.

“I have a five-state market. And because we are so rural, everyone is a rancher. They wear cowboy boots. And cowboy boots aren’t cheap. They’re a tool. You have to have them to do your work. And if you get a good pair of cowboy boots that you like, it’s cheaper to get them fixed than to buy a new pair.

“There’s a lot of shoe repair places in New York and New Jersey, and you see them on Facebook repairing thousand dollar dress shoes. Well, we just don’t see that here. I’ll get a thousand dollar pair of cowboy boots in, but I just don’t see the dress shoes. But that’s okay, because I like the cowboy boots.”

Every repair has to meet with Scoular’s approval. That’s why he believes he has such a loyal customer base.

In addition to shoes, the shop fixes other leather goods. “Purses, you name it. If it can be riveted, stitched or glued — if we can fix it, we’ll do it.”

Scoular’s first forays into leatherwork were in his father’s basement shop outside of Denver, Colorado. (His father was a diesel mechanic who made saddles on the side.) “We lived on a small acreage and had horses and cattle and hogs and everything.” He grew up rodeoing — riding saddle broncs — and naturally gravitated towards building saddles, tack and chaps.

After high school, he left home to attend National American University in Rapid City, where he ended up working at Bob’s. “I always had an interest in shoes and boots and being a broke college kid, I needed some money. Bob had a sign in the door. He put me to work and taught me everything I needed to get started.”

Bob Wessel Sr. started Bob’s Shoe Repair in 1946. His son, Bob Jr., and wife Lori, took over in 1979 and ran the shop until Bob Jr. died suddenly in 2009. Scoular was doing other things at the time, but Lori reached out to see if he would be interested in taking over. He was.

At first, he had to learn fast. Bob had taught him some things, but not everything.

“I didn’t have anyone to show me how to run [the outsole stitcher], so I had to learn on my own. There were a lot of nights spent down here practicing. About ten thousand more pair and I’ll be good at it.”

Many of the machines and tools Scoular works with — like his Landis outsole stitcher — are antiques or aren’t made any more. “There’s fifteen hundred moving parts on this one machine. They used to have guys that come out once a year and tune up your machinery, but that went away thirty years ago. Now, you’ve got to fix them yourself and hope that nothing breaks because parts for these are expensive. But there’s not a whole lot of margin to make a lot of money to go buy new machinery, so you just use the old stuff.”

Scoular’s one hired hand is Clay Banyai, who is also somewhat of a leather artist.

The long nights have paid off (in a shoe repair kind of way). The community that supported the shop through the Wessel years has stood by it.

“I tell you what,” says frequent customer Shane, who stops in while waiting for a haircut next door, “there’s talent streaming out of these guys.” Shane is referring to Scoular and his only hired hand, Clay Banyai. He points out a framed, tooled-leather art piece Banyai created, featuring a pheasant, in the display case in front of the store. He particularly admires the detail on the three-dimensional pheasant head.

“It’s fun,” says Scoular of shoe repair. “It’s the type of job that everything is done with your hands. Everything that we touch has to have my approval on it before it goes out the door. If you want to have a quality product, you have to take pride in everything that you do. And that’s why we have a loyal customer base. I have people ship me stuff from Oregon, Florida, Minnesota, Colorado.”

Maybe one day the disposable epoch will end, shoe repair shops will spring up like Starbucks, and conspiracy theories will abound about Big Shoe Repair suppressing self-fixing shoes. For now though, even minus a revival, Chad Scoular’s place on Main Street seems secure.

“My goal is to make a hundred years. As long as things go the way they are, I think we’re gonna make it. After that I’m done.”

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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Birth of a Brewery

By Michael Zimny

Fernson Brewing Company is a young craft brewery based in Sioux Falls. Even if you haven’t made it to their brewery off North Cliff or their downtown taproom on Eighth, you might have noticed their signature cans with the clean, upbeat design and the gentleman with the feather in his hat.

Owner/brewers Derek Fernholz and Blake Thompson are both South Dakota natives. Fernholz was a home brewer who became obsessed with his hobby, while Thompson began in the wine industry, attended brewing school and got his start at a small brewpub called Bitter Esters in Custer. We visited their Sioux Falls taproom and talked to Fernson about beer, those cans and the locally made movement.

Sioux Falls Startup

We brewed our first batch in February of 2015. Our plan is to release two or three more cans between now and this time next year.

We’re mostly distributed in South Dakota and Northwest Iowa, but we’re working on expanding. We want to take care of home first, so we’re really focused on the southeast corner of the state and radiating out from there. We want to be sure we can deliver fresh product, so it’s just a learning curve thing for us — how logistically to ship a beer that isn’t filtered or pasteurized [further] away.

Sourcing Locally

Most of our grain comes from Shakopee, Minnesota. That’s where the nearest malting facility is. They get their barley from sources in Minnesota, North Dakota and Idaho. There are a few [local] growers — one down by Worthing, Cradle to Grave Farms. They built a malt house and they’re growing some barley, so hopefully they’re going to be our local source by next year.

Our hops for the most part come out of the Pacific Northwest, but we do a fresh hop beer every year and all of the hops come from a farm about 7 miles from here. We’re trying to do more of that. Our water is amazing Sioux Falls water. We had an intern from Augustana University this summer that worked on isolating some native brewing yeast, so we have about six different strands that we’re starting to play with that are completely local and found wild here.

Those Cans

We love cans. Cans are infinitely recyclable. They weigh less, so you can ship more. It saves on fuel consumption, saves money and the environment. The big thing we love is the cans are better for the beer. Think of a can as a micro-keg. Once it’s sealed, nothing — light, oxygen, anything — is getting in and nothing’s getting out. No matter how good that seal is on a bottle, it’s metal crimping the glass, there’s always micro-holes. And no matter how dark, unless the bottle is completely opaque, UV rays will get through. So over time it’s going to change its flavor.

We’re going to do bottles but it’s going to be a special thing, large format and meant to be shared. Our barrel-aged Farmhouse is aged four to six months in red wine barrels. That one will come to bottles soon.

People between the ages of 22 to 25 have grown up with craft beer in cans now and they’re used to finding the beer they love in cans. But there’s still a lot of people that grew up with only terrible or cheap beers that were always in cans, so they have the mentality of cheap beer in cans, good beer in bottles. We’re seeing that change over time.

The guy with the feather in his hat

Fernson is an amalgamation of our last names — Fernholz and Thompson. But we like the idea of having a fictional character called Fernson that we tell our story through. We’re both Lord of the Rings and Tolkien fans, so we were thinking of a wandering sort of sage, Gandolf-esque type person, and tied that into a German guy with a feather in his hat.

In our minds, [the can] looks like it could have been a beer can 50 years ago, but it exists today. We think it stands out on the shelf. You see across the country that nobody’s staying in that box of what a traditional beer looks like anymore.

The main taproom design

It sort of just happened out of elements that we liked. We had a good source for the black steel pipe, so we thought we could use those for table bases. Blake’s uncle is an amazing metal worker, so he welded the frames and did our Fernson face logo. The tables had this industrial type aesthetic, so we found tables and chairs that involved that.

We love the look of barn wood, and we were fortunate enough to find an entire, 100-plus-year-old barn that had just been taken down in the middle of Nebraska, so we bought the whole thing and got the wood up here. It turned out really well, and it’s probably the biggest compliment we get when people come in. You have this warm but industrial looking taproom and people really enjoy it. For the lighting design, we knew we wanted some Edison bulbs exposed to elements for that kind of warm feel. Nancy from Mahlander’s Appliance and Lighting here in town came out and handpicked all of the light fixtures, and they fit the space perfectly.

The new downtown pub

We just kind of had that opportunity fall into our laps last winter and we loved the idea of being a bigger part of downtown Sioux Falls, which is kind of the heart of the city these days. We do live music from time to time, trivia nights, open mic nights, stuff like that. It’s Fernson beer on tap, but we also have curated wine donors as well. Next door is a bakery and pizzeria so people can get food down there. We have an open policy — if you want to bring it with you, we just love people to come and try our beers and if they want food to be a part of that why not?

Local Makers

We’ve embraced it wholly. We’re smaller in Sioux Falls, but percentage-wise we have just as many people doing cool things. We’ve got everything from String Theory Luthiery making violins and guitars that are musical instruments and works of art, The Breaks Coffee Roasting doing artisan, small-batch roasted coffee, to our restaurant scene downtown with independent operators like Bros Brasserie, M.B. Haskett and Mama’s Ladas making amazing artisanal food and sourcing locally when they can, to Breadico making long-fermented, all-natural bread. And that’s just scratching the surface. Sioux Falls has a ton of people making amazing things.

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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Parker’s New Bakery

By Rebecca Johnson

These days,”gluten-free” is almost everywhere. Most major grocery stores carry gluten-free items and an Amazon.com search of the phrase turns up over 190,000 results. But it hasn’t always been that way.

April Smith was first introduced to the gluten-free lifestyle in college at the University of South Dakota.”I had a few roommates in a row diagnosed with celiac disease,” Smith says. She was sympathetic as they adjusted to the digestive disorder that causes an immune reaction to eating gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye, and later was diagnosed with wheat intolerance herself.”It explained a lot of my food choices over my lifetime,” Smith says”It wasn’t just that I didn’t like pasta or beer. It was making me sick.”

After college, Smith spent over a decade managing natural foods sections in Hy-Vee grocery stores in Rochester, Minnesota and Sioux Falls.”One day I had four different dads come in looking for [gluten-free] cupcakes for a little kid’s birthday party at school,” she says.”It just drove me nuts that there were so many kids out there who couldn’t get a cupcake for their birthday safely.” More options are now available, but they’re not always delicious. So Smith and her husband, Clement, decided to start Heart of the City Bakery, a gluten-free bakery in Parker.

Clement spends his”day job” supervising the kitchen at South Middle School in Harrisburg.”He’s the one that hammered out how to make a lot of the initial recipes,” Smith says. They started their business at home, testing muffins, cookies and cupcakes on their kids. Gluten works like a glue that holds ingredients together so it’s a lot of trial and error.”It’s almost better that neither of us are trained bakers because if we were it would drive us nuts what we have to do to make things work now. Like a lot of times instead of kneading air out of bread, I’m trying to put air into bread. Or a cake mix that you would have mixed for 5 or 10 minutes on an industrial mixer, I now need to barely combine the ingredients and then walk away,” she explains

The couple initially filled private orders and traveled to farmers markets. But business grew quickly, so they moved to a building in downtown Parker last July. Space is shared with Brandy’s Custom Cakery, owned by Brandy Engels.”It was a giant old bakery, so we basically divided the back third of it up so it’s two separate bakeries now. We have walls and a door between us that stays shut whenever Brandy’s got any flour flying around,” Smith jokes.”And if an ingredient is not certified gluten-free, I don’t bring it into my bakery.”

April works full-time in Sioux Falls and bakes in her free time, while Engels keeps regular hours. Clients can pick up special orders from Engels’ storefront and the businesses work together for special events.”Brandy does all the wedding orders and we just come back to our bakery and make all the pieces,” Smith says.”Basically I make all the bricks and she mortars it together and makes it gorgeous.”

Besides gluten-free, Heart of the City Bakery can fill vegan orders and work with other allergies. Call (605) 929-9542 to order.”And people are always welcome to call and talk. If you just need to figure out how to feed a kid who has been diagnosed with an allergy, I can always point you to the right web site or the right dietician to get you started,” Smith says.”You know, I’m not trained in that at all, but I’ve spent 15 years helping other people learn how to eat again.”

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On with the Shows

By Rebecca Johnson

As a University of South Dakota alumna, I have many fond memories of Vermillion’s little movie theaters, the Coyote Twin and the Vermillion Theater. My favorite is when my husband — then fiancÈ — and I decided to see a film after a huge blizzard. We first had to clear the driveway to our small trailer, and weren’t sure we’d make the start. Jeremy called the Vermillion Theater.”We’ll wait for you,” the employee assured him. True story.

That’s why I felt so sad when I learned the Vermillion Theater, built in 1918, closed. A leaking roof in the Coyote Twin ruined a projector last summer and Vermillion Theater’s projector was moved down the block to keep the twin screens limping along. Then Jack March, owner of both theaters for over 40 years, put them up for sale with realtor Michelle Maloney. Maloney spoke about the theaters at Yankton’s 1 Million Cups gathering on Aug. 5. Without any real offers, March joked to her that she and her husband should buy them.”We never considered it because we both have our own businesses already and knew it would take a village,” Maloney says.”The Vermillion Downtown Cultural Association (VDCA) formed in the short term to take over the theaters and save a cultural opportunity from going away.”

Maloney is now vice president of the non-profit VDCA. The group took ownership of the theaters in July and the Coyote Twin continues to operate. Through the support of The Vermillion Chamber and Development, USD and other local investors the building got a deep cleaning, new ice machine and a speaker to fix sound that was fuzzy for years. Digital ticketing replaces the former cash or check only policy.”Employees used to make change out of a cigar box,” Maloney told the 1 Million Cups audience with a smile.”They figured sales tax in their head.” Guests will soon purchase tickets on the Vermillion Theaters website and even bigger updates are planned for the future.”We are going to do some very significant physical restoration,” Maloney says. She shared a teaser of the architect’s plans for the Coyote Twin, with a total facelift to the building’s front.

“What we’re trying to do is provide a cinematic opportunity with either classic films, film festivals, documentaries, that type of thing, in the Vermillion Theater and more traditional films in the twin theater,” Maloney explains. The group hosted their inaugural Friday Cult Classic, screening The Princess Bride the weekend of Aug. 7. Another is planned for the weekend of Sept. 11.

Follow the Vermillion Theaters Facebook page and website for events, fundraising and updates on their progress.

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Every South Dakota Town Needs a Big Idea

By Katie Hunhoff

Every South Dakota town we visit is looking for ways to attract new families. Well, there was that one mayor in the town of Cottonwood (pop. 12) on Highway 14 that didn’t want necessarily want people poking around, thinking it was a ghost town. But generally every other town is trying something — from painting storefronts to offering free lots or building event centers — to rejuvenate their communities.

Yankton is trying something different. We are holding a 100-day search for a big idea that has the potential to change Yankton for generations. The person with the winning idea will receive $10,000. But the hope is that everyone in Yankton will be a winner if we can have a conversation about Yankton’s future, and also find a project the whole community can rally behind. The search is dubbed Onward Yankton and you can follow along or submit ideas on the website. The Onward Yankton group hopes submissions come from not just Yankton but across the state and country.

Larry Ness, a local banker and a founder of Onward Yankton, says the old river city is just one of many places struggling in today’s fast-changing world. “We think a community-wide exercise to decide Yankton’s next step will have a lot of value in itself. But once we select an idea, a bunch of us are committed to seeing if we can’t make it happen.”

Carmen Schramm, the executive director of the Yankton Chamber, says Yankton has always been a town of big ideas — starting with its designation as the territorial capitol in 1861. “As a city, we’ve started colleges, built one of the first bridges across the Missouri and our residents even built a dam and a lake in the 1950s — not to mention schools, hospitals and serving as an agricultural center.

“We’re proud of all we’ve accomplished,” she said. “But cities our size can’t rest on their laurels. We have to keep adapting and looking for the next challenge that will keep us as an exciting place where young people want to live and work.”

The May/June issue of South Dakota Magazine includes a feature article that talks directly to young South Dakotans, specifically to May graduates. Yes, they already receive advice from parents, teachers and mentors. But we found 18 interesting (and wise) South Dakotans to provide a unique and heartfelt perspective. One of my favorite submissions came from our poet laureate, retired SDSU Professor David Allan Evans. He begins with an anecdote from about 20 years ago when he was very earnestly and carefully teaching a writing class at SDSU. He finished the class feeling pleased with himself. But then a student came up to him and told him he had a leaf on his head. The young professor became embarrassed and agitated, and he felt it had ruined his entire lecture. Now, the story has become a lesson on humility and how not to take himself too seriously — “Something that all of us need to learn as we mature with time,” he writes.

I’d like to think the citizens of Yankton are following his advice with our Big Idea contest. We’re not saying we know all the answers — that’s why we are asking for your ideas. And we’re not taking ourselves too seriously. We look forward to a lot of silly and fun discussion over which idea to pick. But we are serious about the future of our town and our youth. I encourage you visit the Onward Yankton website to learn more, and also to read our letters to youth in the May/June issue. Who knows, the letters might spark an idea worth $10,000. Even better, the project might provide Yankton and other rural communities some ideas on how to grow and prosper.

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Fine Fermenting

By Rebecca Johnson

I started drinking kombucha a few years ago. Maybe you’ve seen it in your nearest health food store. It’s a beverage fermented from black tea, sugar and a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY). I like the tart flavor and refreshing fizziness. The probiotics and nutrients are great, too. But the $4 a bottle price tag makes me cringe. A friend gave me a starter SCOBY (it looked like a flat mushroom cap) to brew my own, but I was too nervous. I’d heard rumors of people dying from bad homebrews.

That’s why I was excited to find Cultures for Health, a website headquartered in Sioux Falls with an abundance of fermentation information and products. Founder Julie Feickert became interested in healthy living after her first child was born.”I took a class on living sustainably and learned about eating a whole foods diet and the amazing number of fermented foods you could make at home,” Feickert says. She purged her cupboards of processed foods and started making her own yogurt, kombucha, kefir and sauerkraut. And the more she made, the more she realized the need for a website with quality instructions, recipes and starter cultures.

“Meanwhile, I was facing a decision to go back to work teaching at night,” Feickert says.”My son was still quite young, and I really didn’t want to leave him, so I was looking for a way to work from home.” In 2009 she built a simple website and stocked a few products.”It took off beyond anything I had ever imagined.”

Cultures for Health now offers over 350 products for at-home fermentation and has a staff of 20. Feickert moved her business headquarters and her family from Portland, Oregon, to Sioux Falls in 2012.”We needed to be more centrally located to better control the quality of shipping perishable products and keep shipping costs and transit times as low as possible for our customers,” Feickert says.”Sioux Falls had a great mix of excellent shipping conditions, affordable living and a safe place to raise our young children.”

I haven’t made my own kombucha yet, but I feel more confident to try. Feickert’s website has a wealth of “how-to” videos and articles and sells pH indicator strips for the squeamish to test when the beverage is ready. And besides kombucha, they have products for yogurt, kefir, sourdough, buttermilk, cheese and more to help people ferment confidently.

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Irish Twins Soap

By Rebecca Johnson

Erin Nelson, owner of Irish Twins Soap Company, grew up in a health-conscious family. Her father’s law office was above Black Hills Staple and Spice Market, a natural foods store in Rapid City. She’d go to the Y for ballet or swimming after school.”Then we’d head over to the store to get licorice and go up to my dad’s office,” Nelson remembers.”My dad always shopped there. There were all kinds of things that nobody else eats or uses — like granola, chlorophyll and cleansers — but it was kind of normal to me.”

Nelson continued that healthy lifestyle into adulthood, striving to avoid chemicals and impurities.”It’s made a huge difference in how I feel, how my body feels and how my skin feels,” she says. So when she couldn’t find the type of soap she wanted in local stores she started crafting her own.”I decided people have been making it for hundreds of years and I just wanted to know how,” Nelson says.

Nelson turned soap making into a full-fledged business in 2009, when her boss died of cancer and she was left without work.”I looked for a job for several months and couldn’t find anything, so I just started [Irish Twins Soap Company] and never looked back.” She now creates all-natural soaps, household cleaners, deodorant, body butter, lip balm or sugar scrubs daily in her farmhouse kitchen near Beresford and buys local ingredients when possible.”I’m super fussy about where they come from and what’s in them,” Nelson says. Her honey and beeswax come from a farm about a mile outside of Beresford called Dahlberg Farms. She buys herbs and botanicals from the farmers market, goat’s milk from a local farmer and essential oils from a company in Minnesota.

Nelson handcrafts over 35 bar soaps, including varieties for acne, psoriasis and eczema. All soaps are hand-stirred and produced in small batches. Last week she made eight 11-pound batches, at 40 bars each. Many contain French green clay and red Moroccan clay, and soaps like Metamorphic Rockstar, BadAss Biker, and Dakota Gunsmoke contain activated charcoal.”The clays pull toxins out of your skin and activated charcoal does too,” Nelson says.”When people are poisoned they feed them spoons full of charcoal to draw out the toxins. It’s the same thing with your face or anywhere else on the body.”

Customers are responding to Nelson’s good-for-you philosophy. Her business is”on full blast” with wholesale clients, web orders and arts and craft shows. Nelson plans to expand into a larger studio and she’ll soon have a tiny soap shop on wheels.”I love my outdoors shows, but soap and rain don’t mix,” Nelson says.”Last summer I bought a 1965 Yellowstone old-school camping trailer that we gutted, so that is in the works to be my little pop-up.” Look for her at the Brookings Summer Arts Festival July 14-15. She’ll also be handing out samples at Pomegranate Market in Sioux Falls Saturday, March 15, from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

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Manpower and Free Market Fundamentals

By Cory Allen Heidelberger


Our publisher invited me to write a column “From the Left.” So why do I feel like I keep coming around “To the Right” of South Dakota’s Republicans?

Governor Dennis Daugaard was willing to invest $5,000,000 in an exclusive contract with Manpower, an out-of-state recruiting company that promised to help Dennis bring 1,000 new workers to South Dakota. After burning up a million taxpayer dollars, they recruited just 95.

Governor Daugaard is wisely defunding that particular economic development initiative. But he’s still asking for tax dollars to continue our grants and loans and other recruitment efforts to coax businesses and workers to buck the market and come to South Dakota.

The failure of the Manpower initiative and the Governor’s persistence in other economic development spending raises a tough question: what is the proper role of government in economic development?

I propose a political experiment: let’s find a candidate for Governor — Republican, Democrat, Independent, I don’t care, though we might have to turn to the Constitution Party to find someone this crazy — who will advocate eliminating all state economic development programs. No more Governor’s Office of Economic Development, this candidate would cry from the hustings. No grants for beef-packing plants. No promotion of green-card buying to funnel foreign dollars into shaky local projects that can’t win traditional investment. No tax rebates for any business projects, big or small.

Instead (our candidate would declare in faithful Adam Smith fashion), let government fulfill its proper role of doing what the private sector cannot or will not. Build good roads and schools and sewers and parks. Build public services and policies that serve and protect all citizens equally. Create a reliable, uniform economic framework in which business and labor can make their own decisions about where to set up shop. But never step into the marketplace with a state decision or a state check that gives one business or one worker a benefit that is not available to every other actor in the South Dakota marketplace.

How would such a candidate fare in a South Dakota election? Do South Dakotans believe that business can grow and prosper without direct state intervention? Or do we think that South Dakota’s businesses and communities are so inherently disadvantaged that state government has to do their recruiting work for them? Could any candidate, left-wing or right-wing, lead that conversation… and win votes with it?

Editor’s Note: Cory Heidelberger is our political columnist from the left. For a right-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Dr. Ken Blanchard every other Monday on this site.

Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and has taught math, English, speech, and French at high schools East and West River.


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The Original Kimball Popcorn Ball

By Laura Johnson Andrews

If you’ve ever fished a round, hard popcorn ball out of the bottom of your Halloween treat bag, you’ll marvel at the popcorn treats produced in Kimball. The Original Kimball Popcorn Ball is soft and easy to pull apart, sweet but not sticky. (It is possible, for example, to jam a bunch of kernels in one’s mouth while typing and not worry about gumming up one’s keyboard.) David Olson, general manager and part owner of The Original Kimball Popcorn Ball, LLC, says the secret is in the slurry.”Most popcorn balls are made of more of a sugar-water slurry. Our popcorn balls use a soft, slightly sweet marshmallow blend.”

Kimball’s journey on the road to sweet success started when a few locals began selling popcorn balls out of a local gas station. Over the years, they got more and more requests to mail the balls out of town.”Finally, we got a call from a gal in Utah or Nevada. She had an ill family member in the hospital. She asked, ‘What can I get for you?’ and the person requested our Kimball popcorn ball. We felt that was a sign from above that we should get the courage and try to pursue this thing,” said David Olson, general manager and part owner of The Original Kimball Popcorn Ball, LLC.

After a lot of research, Olson and his partners in popcorn, business owners Eric Pulse, Lee Pulse and Scott Handel, decided to take the risk. In August of 2009, they sold their first popcorn balls from their new factory, a small building that was once a convenience store.

The little factory has five part-time employees, but because the owners believe in buying local, Kimball’s treat has a broader impact.”We try to involve as many people as we can,” Olson said. Lakota Foods provides the popcorn, Fatland Honey flavors the honey popcorn ball, and the butter’s bought in bulk at the local grocery store. Even the gas flush, which pushes oxygen out of the packaging to keep the popcorn balls fresh, is procured from the local gas supply company.”We’re just trying to be an important part of Kimball and of the state of South Dakota,” Olson said.

Because of the company’s size, production is done on a relatively small scale, with plenty of human involvement. They pop corn daily in a 48 oz. popper, averaging 50-60 batches a day. Each batch makes 47 or 48 balls. The marshmallow slurry used to bind the balls doesn’t pour easily into a hopper, so workers load the factory’s popcorn ball machine by hand to create 4 oz. popcorn balls in two flavors: original and honey. A new flavor, caramel, should be available in 3 or 4 weeks.

Kimball popcorn balls are available at retail locations in 20 different states and on their website, www.kimballpopcornball.com. The owners are currently investigating the possibility of selling internationally, and hope to someday expand their business to offer smaller popcorn balls.”That is something that some of the big, big buyers want,” Olson said.

One of the biggest obstacles to Kimball’s domination of the popcorn ball world is the perception that popcorn balls are just for Halloween and Christmas. Olson said,”We’re trying to get rid of the bias that popcorn balls are a seasonal item. That’s been a tremendous hurdle to overcome.” But the determined folks in Kimball can do it. It just takes time, hard work, hometown pride and a lot of marshmallow slurry.

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Finding Support After the Storm

By Laura Andrews

Last week’s blizzard was devastating to South Dakota’s cattlemen and women, with livestock losses estimated in the tens of thousands. It’s hard for outsiders to understand the impact — both financial and emotional — that this will have on West River ranchers. Joan Wink of Howes, South Dakota said,”There are no words to describe the devastation and loss. Everywhere we look there are dead cattle. I’ve never seen so many.”

Here are a few sites that offer insight into the impact as well as concrete ways to help those affected: