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This post is part of our Big Company, Small Town series, featuring large companies and the small towns in which they are headquartered.
Ah, Spam. Doesn't the word make your mouth water? Or maybe not. Either way, Spam must be given its due. It is the most famous of the mystery meats, those exciting concoctions of the meat-packing industry. It has been sold by the billions of cans since its invention in 1937. It helped feed the Allies and win World War Two. It is central to a Monty Python skit about Vikings in a greasy spoon, and now a Broadway musical. It provides a name for unwanted e-mail. It theoretically lasts forever. And it is a product of the Hormel Foods Corporation (NYSE: HRL).
Spam is made in several places, but its ancestral home and main production facility is in Austin, Minnesota, sometimes called Spam Town. Austin is the small town south of Minneapolis that is home to Hormel, proud maker of all things Spam. (I should note that Hormel would prefer that we write "SPAM luncheon meat" but I don't think we'll take that suggestion too seriously.)
Hormel has long dominated the town of Austin, and not just because the Spam Museum is located there. It is by far the largest employer in town and the majority of workers in Austin work for Hormel, producing many of the company's meaty foods. Hormel's roots in the town go deep. Drawn by the town's good rail and river access, George A. Hormel opened a meat packing business there in 1891, and his small company eventually grew into the billion-dollar colossus that today owns a dizzying array of food brands, from Chi-Chi's and Valley Fresh to Dinty Moore and, of course, Spam. (Does it seem fair that one company gets to own both Dinty Moore and Spam?)
George Hormel was a classic 19th century American man of business. He started from scratch and invented a new product, the canned ham, that changed the way people consumed food. He earned great wealth and ruled over his company and his home town as a benevolent dictator, paying good wages in his plants while establishing civic organizations for the benefit of all citizens. But as happened with so many other small companies that became very large, that personal relationship between town and company was eventually lost. A long and bitter strike at the main Hormel plant in Austin in the mid-1980s drove that point home, especially when the company called in the National Guard against the strikers. By most accounts, the effects of that strike still linger, and the company town of Austin, Minnesota, has lost some of that old-fashioned charm that once seemed to protect it from the ravages of global capitalism.
Be sure to check out more Big Company, Small Town posts.
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