Just as St. Paul–based sporting goods retailer Gander Mountain shifts its near-term growth plans from bricks and mortar to catalog and online sales, Burnsville-based Northern Tool and Equipment moves in the same direction with the late August launch of Kotula’s (kotulas.com), a new catalog and online business focused on fun gadgets and tools for driving, boating, home security, hunting, fishing, outdoor entertaining, and similar categories.
The Faegre & Benson law firm has formed a cross-practice group of more than 100 attorneys focused on the food, agriculture, and biofuels industry. Services encompass litigation, mergers and acquisitions, real estate, immigration, intellectual property, and environmental law. Faegre’s clients include General Mills, Verasun Energy, and Cargill.
Treasure Island Resort and Casino near Red Wing has opened a $50 million addition that nearly triples event space and nearly doubles hotel rooms to 482. The Prairie Island Indian Community, which owns and operates Treasure Island, employs 1,600 people and is the largest employer in Goodhue County.
We gave it last rites in our September “Best of Business” feature, but SimonDelivers was revived. St. Cloud–based Coborn’s, which operates 34 Coborn’s and Cash Wise Foods grocery stores in six Upper Midwest states, acquired the shuttered SimonDelivers in late August and will resume grocery delivery service in October under the CobornsDelivers brand. SimonDelivers CEO Liwanag Ojala has stayed on as general manager of the CobornsDelivers e-commerce division.
Syngenta Seeds, a Golden Valley–based division of Switzerland’s Syngenta AG, will use a $43,000 grant from the Minnesota Job Skills Partnership to develop a lean product-design and -development program. Nonprofit Enterprise Minnesota, which administers the grant, says similar programs have resulted in a nearly 50 percent reduction in product launch schedules and have greatly improved gross margins for other manufacturer.
DoApp, Inc., based in Minneapolis and drawing on programming talent from ex-IBMers in Rochester, was founded just last year and has logged more than 1 million downloads of its free MyLite application for Apple iPhone and iPod Touch devices. MyLite turns your screen into a strobe light, flashlight, and—this totally rocks—a flaming cigarette lighter for concerts.
