2007 Minnesota Business Hall of Fame

“Don wasn’t afraid to take chances,” says Dale Nelson, who worked with Helgeson for 31 years, at Gold‘n Plump, and then at Liberty Savings Bank. “But he’s also the kind of guy who liked to stake things out first. He would always ask, ‘Where will this be in five years?’”

Jack Frost was known as a hatchery, but it had grown into a successful breeding, feeding, milling, and processing operation. In 1978, the company became JFC, Inc., and later took the name of the brand it launched that year, Gold’n Plump.

Another huge leap forward came in 1983, when the company bought the processing plant in Cold Spring. Nelson says, “We created a totally vertically integrated poultry operation—we did it all!”

From the mid-’80s to the early ’90s, the broiler market skyrocketed, due largely to new demand from Russia. “We were making money hand over fist,” Don Helgeson says. “That felt pretty good. Of course, the market collapsed again in the ’90s [under a glut of supply], and we were back in the soup.”

Don Helgeson—like his father before him—left day-to-day Gold’n Plump operations and moved to Liberty Savings Bank in the early ’80s, bringing with him six years’ experience as a director of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank. Liberty has since acquired a national charter and become Minnesota’s largest residential mortgage originator outside of the Twin Cities.

But Helgeson is most proud of the “culture of concern” at Gold’n Plump: concern “for the farmer partners that we have, for our employees, and for the community.” Nearly half of the company’s equity is held by an employee stock ownership program. Gold’n Plump has been a Minnesota Keystone company for 15 years, giving 5 percent of its pretax profits back to the community.

> Watch video from the 2007 Hall of Fame gala.