TO DULUTH AND BEYOND

Despite the odds, business booms for ‘Minnesota Wild’

McGregor, Minn. — Minnesota Wild has set up shop in Duluth. Not the hockey team, mind you — the eight-year-old trademark brand of Minnesota Specialty Crops, Inc.

Company founder Jay Erckenbrack is beating the odds. While most business startups collapse within five years, his Minnesota Wild brand is rapidly expanding and now prominently displayed on a Canal Park Drive store front. The spacious tourist destination is stocked with home-grown goodies, from jellies and syrups to jewelry and crafts.

Erckenbrack and Lori Gordon, general manager, started out in McGregor, Minn., where they still process tons of wild chokecherries, blackberries, black currants, high bush cranberries, Juneberries, blueberries, pincherries, plums, grapes and raspberries. Beside jellies and syrups, they whip wild flavors into southern Minnesota honeys; the most popular of five varieties is hazelnut. Add in the wild rice pancake mix and maple syrup and it’s a full-fledged gourmet food company.

Three years ago, with AURI’s help, Minnesota Wild entered the wine business. The current line of 15 wines, from fruits like highbush cranberry, wild plum and chokecherry, are sold in restaurants, liquor stores and at the McGregor winery.

Tourists can view the wine operation through large glass windows in the wine-tasting room. They love it, Erckenbrack says. “People get a kick out of coming to McGregor. They say, ‘you make this all right here?’”

Target the tourists
For three years Erckenbrack eyed the tourism mecca of Duluth for a retail store. When a prime spot on Lake Superior’s waterfront opened up, he grabbed it and hung up the Minnesota Wild sign on a historic street accentuated by Duluth’s lift bridge. “I pay through the nose for this place, but it’s worth every penny,” he says.

At first, you might not guess Erckenbrack has masterminded this successful venture. Strictly the T-shirt and jeans type, he says he spruces up now and then with a shave. It’s not easy to get the dry-humored man of few words (unless you’re talking about a certain name-swiping hockey team) to crack a smile, even for the camera.

Erckenbrack isn’t a flashy promoter, but he lives and sleeps his business. “I woke up this morning from a dream about wild rice,” he says, seemingly a little piqued. There could be better things to dream about.

Erckenbrack and Gordon have expanded the Minnesota Wild label to jewelry made at the Red Lake Reservation, willow baskets from Leech Lake Reservation, and birch bark canoe baskets, birdhouses and other crafts from the White Earth Reservation. European tourists, in particular, “love anything to do with native Americans,” Erckenbrack says.

They sell their own wild berry note cards and have brought in hand-painted doll furniture, hand-made soaps, candies, and even comical black bear statues from the Kettle River Carving Company. When Chris Poelma’s candy shop was squeezed out of Duluth’s popular Fitger’s building, Erckenbrack brought her gourmet candies to Minnesota Wild, where Poelma now manages the shop.

“It’s a lot of homegrown stuff” that tourists get excited about, says Erckenbrack. He’s canceled two boundary-water canoe trips this summer to tend to the Duluth store, which could generate a half million in sales by the year’s end, eight months after opening.

A fly in the jelly
“This year should have been a blast,” says Erckenbrack. But last January he discovered his trademarked name was adopted by Minnesota’s new NHL team. It’s the one topic that can get his low-key demeanor steaming. “The store’s taking a beating,” he says.

“Professional sports conjures up images of locker rooms,” not gourmet whipped honeys and fine wines. Although the team has offered to help him sell his jellies, Erckenbrack doesn’t want the association and says it has a negative effect on customers. At a prestigious Minneapolis food and wine show last February, “40 percent who stopped at our booth didn’t even sample the wine – (because) they figured the team made it.”

His legal battle arguing exclusive trademark rights to the Minnesota Wild name is costing a bundle. “It comes down to the enormous versus the small guy, and there’s no end in sight,” Erckenbrack says. The company is ready to print colorful wild berry labels for their condiments, but legal bills are eating up the spare funds.

Erckenbrack’s not the type to sit back, though. He spews out new product ideas so fast it’s tough to catch them all — blueberry and raspberry flavored salad dressings, vinegar, syrups, chutneys, even a raspberry-chocolate swirl biscotti. The latest entry in Minnesota Wild’s market line is blueberry salsa, which he predicts will be a best seller. “The underlying flavor is salsa but the blueberry really comes through.” His favorite is still the “robust flavor” of black currant syrup, but customers’ favorite remains chokecherry jelly, the kind everyone remembers grandma making.

Berries loom larger than ever
Erckenbrack’s business has grown beyond wild berries; he now adds cultivated blueberries and raspberries to the mix. But this year he will still use 60,000 to 70,000 pounds of wild berries — gathered from the north woods by about 500 harvesters, most from the reservations, but a few from as far away as Worthington and Albert Lea. Erckenbrack would also like to purchase low-bush cranberries from the Red Lake Band and area farmers when they’re ready for harvest.

Beside retail stores in McGregor and Duluth, Minnesota Wild products can be found in many specialty shops, including three at the Mall of America, and upscale grocers such as Byerly’s and Lunds. The mail order business is likewise strong: “Forty to fifty percent of our customers come from out of state,” Erckenbrack says.