After nine decades, The Mengelkoch Company, a rendering company in New Brighton, MN, closed its doors earlier this year. The company’s routes and trucks were purchased by ERC, an affiliate of The Van Hoven Company. Mengelkoch President Muriel Bochnak, who has been active with the company for the past 40 years, is retiring.
“I just decided it was time to try something else – retirement,” Bochnak commented. Another factor helped her decide it was time to close up shop.
“The city is redeveloping the area and has been wanting the property for quite a while,” she said. “They also bought five other neighboring businesses, including a closed Darling [International] plant.” Bochnak estimates that including her five acres and Darling’s five acres, 50 acres of land is being redeveloped for multi-family housing.
Henry Mengelkoch, Bochnak’s grandfather, started the business in 1910, buying furs, ginseng, pelts, and hides. He opened an office in Minneapolis, MN, and the rendering/processing plant in nearby New Brighten adjacent to another renderer, Pete Van Hoven, who eventually moved his business to South St. Paul, MN, in 1961.
Mengelkoch had previously been in the rendering business with his brother-in-law in the 1880s on land further east of the plant’s present location. At the time, the area was booming with packing plants and rendering operations to serve the New Brighton stockyards.
When Mengelkoch died in 1938, his daughter, Madeline Bochnak, the youngest of five adult children and one of four girls, was selected to run the business. She was a graduate of the University of Minnesota with a degree in business administration.
Madeline worked at the rendering plant while her husband toiled for a roofing company to make ends meet. When the rendering business began to make a profit, George joined his wife, overseeing the plant and trucks while Madeline handled the routes, customers, products sales, and office.
During World War II, Henry’s son-in-law and grandsons were recruited to load hides and help on plant projects such as installing brick-set boilers. At the same time, Madeline drove the trucks from the Minneapolis office to the plant to be unloaded so the drivers could make another route. While the trucks were being unloaded, Madeline unwrapped and dumped the coffee cans of grease that housewives had saved and turned into the local grocer as part of the war effort. The grease was used to produce glycerin for bullets.
When George died in 1958, Madeline continued running the business and within a year consolidated the operation by building a new office and hide warehouse in New Brighton and shortening the company’s name from Henry Mengelkoch Co. to The Mengelkoch Co. It wasn’t long after that when one of George and Madeline’s two daughters, Muriel, began working in the family business part-time while in high school and joined full-time when Madeline suffered a stoke in 1964. A graduate of the University of Minnesota with a business administration degree, Muriel took over the rendering operation when her mother died in 1971. Muriel’s sister, Mary, a professor at Hamline University, joined the business in 1985 on a part-time basis running the office.
Over the years, many family members worked at the plant – Henry’s son, Art, was a truck driver until he retired; Art’s son and grandson, Harold and John, also were drivers; and Henry’s daughters, Aline and Bernice, worked part-time in the office until they retired when in their late 70s.
Operations in the rendering plant changed over the years. Gasoline, then diesel-powered trucks replaced the horse drawn wagons used in the early years. The coal-stoked boiler was converted to natural gas/No. 2 fuel oil. Open kettle cookers were replaced by enclosed steam jacketed cookers – a change from wet to dry rendering. Hydraulic presses gave way to expellers to remove the fat from the bone material. Air and water pollution control equipment was added in the 1970s to improve the environment. The only thing that didn’t change over the nine decades was the basic recycling process: raw fat and bones from meat markets and packing plants and slaughter houses were collected, ground, and cooked to produce another product for resale.
Originally, Mengelkoch sold the fat for laundry and bar soap, the cracklings for fertilizer, i.e., bone meal and blood meal, and the tallow was used for candles. But as the times changed, so did the end use. Before closing, most of the company’s fats and meals were used in animal feed, especially in Minnesota’s poultry industry. Some fat went to the chemical industry for use in such items as paints and tires.
Mengelkoch stopped buying ginseng, pelts, and furs many years ago, but cow hides remained a large part of the business. The hides were collected, trimmed, and salted for preservation, then sold to a tanner or exported for tanning overseas.
Due to the company’s closure, there is quite a bit of rendering equipment available for purchase from the batch plant, such as cookers, prebreakers, storage tanks, office equipment, and plumbing. Bochnak can be reached at (651) 633-0173.
Newsline - June 2003 Render