With AURI since its start, Bill Stoll leaves a legacy
of personal service to business start-ups

By Cindy Green

Bill Stoll, a long-time champion of Minnesota entrepreneurs, is starting his own new venture — retirement. The dedicated food scientist amassed a decade of AURI service to start-up businesses and several decades of service in the food industry and academia.

Even after 40 years of helping people profit from new products, Stoll says he’ll never tire of flushing out a new idea. Whether improving butter flavor or making starch glue to hold cornstalk board together, “I get a real bang out of serving people,” Stoll says. “It makes my day when someone calls with a question and I can share in solving a problem.”

Testing the limits

On the surface, Stoll is an attractive, courtly senior with a constant, gentle smile. Look closer, and you’ll see the mischievous twinkle of a young boy who will always test the limits. Stoll is fascinated with entrepreneurial ventures. “The most exciting thing a person could do — and the scariest — is to be an entrepreneur. You challenge every creative bone in your body — like jumping off a ledge with a bunge cord. If it holds, it’s the most exciting thing you’ve ever done. If not, will you survive the drop?”

Since joining AURI in its infancy 10 years ago, Stoll has worn whatever hat his client needed. He’s analyzed medicinal-value crops such as chicory in the lab. He’s set up direct-marketing systems on dairy farms. He’s sat in living rooms helping write business plans and in a home kitchen whipping up starch binder for garden mulch. He’s helped an entrepreneur set up an oil extrusion plant in an old dairy barn and linked up a rural dairy co-op with a metro business making an ice cream treat. Along the way, he has celebrated with a client receiving his first patent and grieved with another losing his wife to cancer.

Through it all, Stoll has vicariously lived the life of an entrepreneur. And though he has seen more failures than successes in the ruthless marketplace, he has nothing but praise for anyone who has the heart to try. “It takes a lot of confidence and courage” to launch a product, he says. “Unfortunately, we measure success by bottom-line dollars. The unmeasured piece of AURI’s success is tapping into creative minds in the rural sector.”

No dumb ideas — just be real

During his first five years at AURI, Stoll managed the Waseca office. In 1993, he moved to St. Paul to provide statewide service in product research and development. His R&D expertise was honed by years of experience at Green Giant and in university laboratories.

My approach to clients has always been, “don’t say this is a dumb idea,” Stoll says. Rather, he helped clients “think it through, see another approach — maybe a more realistic approach. Lots of projects didn’t work out, but some with good ideas were able to solidify those ideas.”

Stoll is most proud of helping launch starch packing peanuts in the marketplace six years ago, an industry that now accounts for 20 percent of the loosefill packaging market. It all started with a lunch at Embers in St. Paul, when the owner of a small company using popcorn for packaging said he was looking for a way to pop bigger batches.

A bang went off in Stoll’s head — the sound he’d heard as a child visiting a plant where cereal was popped under high pressure. Lids of huge canisters loaded with cooked cereal were clamped shut and heated to extreme temperatures. Then a sledge hammer hitting the clamp would release the pressure, causing the lid to fly open and exploding the grain as if from a cannon. Today’s technology is similar, but allows for continuous popping to make puffed rice, wheat and corn cereals and snacks. Stoll suggested the entrepreneur go to Malt O’ Meal to make something like corn curls for packaging.

Malt O’ Meal suggested an extrusion company with the technology to make starch peanuts. “The challenge, then, was to make a product with enough rigidity.” Several years later, Clean Green packing peanuts are a big success, even though the original entrepreneur is no longer with the company.

“I take pride in being creative and I attribute my rural upbringing to that,” Stoll says. “Old-time farming was terribly creative. Farmers could fix anything.”

You can take the boy out of farm life, but ...

Stoll grew up in the farming town of Lamoni, Iowa, where his father managed a cooperative creamery. By his teens, he had worked almost every creamery job, picking up weekend shifts and covering for employees on vacation. “The job that set the stage for future work at AURI was picking up cream on the cream route, talking with farmers, and developing relationships.” Besides giving him a rural perspective, “growing up in the food environment contributed to my perception of how to solve problems,” Stoll says.

In college, Stoll excelled in chemistry and earned his bachelors in dairy industry and masters in food technology at Iowa State University. His first job, at South Dakota State University, focused on butter flavor (see “Bill wants better butter,” next page). After eight years, he headed to the University of Minnesota in St. Paul to study under a world-renowned dairy scientist. There he received a Ph.D. in dairy and food industry with a research focus in cheese making.

Stoll planned to stay in academia and teach. “I have never been driven by power or money,” he says. But an opportunity arose at Green Giant in Le Sueur, Minn. that he couldn’t pass up. “That was really fortunate. I grew up. It opened a whole new horizon and brought me into the real world ... Green Giant was small enough that we wore lots of hats.”

It was gratifying work until food giant Pillsbury stepped in to buy the company. “They kicked me out one day because I wore a green coat and Pillsbury colors were blue,” Stoll laughs.

After 15 years, Stoll was let go — “out on the street at 50 years old.” Fortuitously, a dairy instructor position opened up at the University of Minnesota-Waseca and Stoll moved right in. Soon he was participating in a national conference addressing farm surpluses, sponsored in part by the USDA. “At that time (mid ’80s), piles of corn and soybeans were sitting out in the open.”

Stoll also participated in the New Farm and Forest Task Force, which concluded federal investment was needed to research and commercialize industrial products from commodities. The task force’s recommendation resulted in USDA’s AARC program.

At the same time, the Minnesota Legislature created AURI and Stoll participated in Waseca’s bid to be AURI’s home site. When AURI’s steering committee decided to locate the Institute in four regional offices with headquarters in Crookston, Stoll was asked to manage the Waseca office.

Cherish each step

In the first year, the position held little glamour. Office space was slim pickings on campus; a sectioned-off corner of a men’s dormitory lounge served as Stoll’s first office. The smoke-filled office lacked air conditioning, and music blared so loud that “vibrations would tilt the pictures,” Stoll says. But his office moved four more times, each time an improvement, until the regional office settled into its current site at the Experiment Station.

For someone who’s more comfortable helping a client make cheese or finding a small meat shop a better slicer for ham, office location has never been a big priority. Stoll says every life event has led him to the next level, and he cherishes every step. “AURI has been a nice way to cap off a career helping people at a personal level.”

“Bill brought to AURI not only a local and state perspective, but a national one. He shared that with AURI and, in a large sense, is responsible for how AURI evolved,” says AURI Deputy Director Keith Sannes, the only AURI employee serving longer than Stoll. “Many times, when we were looking for perspective, Bill would be the go-to person.

“And he was always there for the person coming up with a new business — he was always on their team.”