FREMONT, Neb. (AP) - An entrepreneur here has taken a cooking technique from the Great Plains and turned it into a business that is growing fast enough to warrant a 10,000-square-foot addition to its headquarters and distribution center.
Seth McGinn’s CanCooker, the name of both the business and its flagship product, has made its way from humble beginnings shipping out of a local storage unit to selling in stores that include Cabela’s, Bass Pro Shops and Walmart.
The Omaha World-Herald reports (https://bit.ly/158820c ) the addition, expected to be completed in early spring, will push the company’s total space to 27,000 square feet and make room for additional offices and employees.
Today, CanCooker has 17,000 square feet of space and about 10 full-time employees, but McGinn said, “It’s all getting bottlenecked.”
That’s because the company received orders for more than 60,000 CanCookers in 2014. This number doesn’t include orders for its other products, which include a smaller version of the CanCooker, a portable gas burner and folding cutting boards.
“We’re bursting at the seams and it’s time to pull the trigger,” he said of the expansion.
Think of the CanCooker as a vessel for a sort of Midwestern low-country boil.
It’s a commercial take on “cream can suppers” that were a fixture on McGinn’s grandfather’s ranch in northeast Nebraska. On that ranch and others across the Plains, daylong cattle brandings called for a low-maintenance, high-volume method of cooking, and that’s where cream cans came in.
Instead of tasking someone with spending hours preparing and cooking a meal in a far-away kitchen, a cream can could easily hold enough food for dozens of people and required nothing more than sliced vegetables, sausage, spices, a little water and a heat source.
McGinn said he got the idea to move the method off the ranch and onto the patio when he realized he was spending hours behind a grill during summer cookouts.
“I thought to myself, ’This is dumb. I’m having a party and doing all the work while everyone has a good time and I only get to see these people two or three times a year,’ ” he said.
The first attempt to replicate his grandfather’s method failed, however.
After the lid blew off the top, the lead solder on the base of the can got too hot and the bottom fell out.
So McGinn and a friend fashioned a square vessel first out of stainless steel and later out of aluminum to test an improvised version. When those worked, they made a round one more akin to the cream cans of yore and McGinn started seeing the potential.
“People saw it and were like, ’I want three for Christmas gifts,’ and it grew from there,” McGinn said.
The full-size version retails at full price for about $90 and the smaller version for about $60.
The cooker’s latched lid locks in heat and steam, cooking meals similar to a slow cooker but faster. It can be used indoors and outdoors on any stovetop, campfire, burner, grill or portable cooktop.
Five years ago, the business consisted of a rented storage unit and, when enough orders rolled in, operations overflowed into McGinn’s garage. There, McGinn and his wife spent nights and weekends after his full-time job in product development at Hewlett-Packard putting shipping labels on boxes that contained the first CanCookers.
“We would bring a pallet home from the storage unit, put them in the garage to put labels on them and then take them to the UPS store in west Omaha,” McGinn said. “Now, we’re the largest FedEx shipper in Fremont.”
McGinn’s wife, Sonja, who previously worked in the animal health industry, is national accounts manager and chief financial officer for the business.
The company has also grown large enough to require three Chinese factories with which McGinn contracts manufacturing of the aluminum vessels, up from one when he launched the company in 2009.
McGinn said he was introduced to Chinese contract manufacturers while running his side business that imports raw materials used in health supplements for people with arthritis.
Making CanCookers here, he said, would cost four times as much, but the company’s growth has opened the door for local manufacturing of other product lines.
There are about 20 different CanCooker products, including a line of seasonings that is made down the street at International Spices.
There, CEO Eric Hochstein said he’s just doing his part to help expand the local economy.
“If we’re doing business for them and producing product for them, it’s in our best interest that they grow,” Hochstein said. “We’ll do everything we can to help out.”
Janell Ehrke, CEO and founder of nonprofit economic development organization GROW Nebraska, said products like McGinn’s are most successful when they are marketed more as an experience. And it’s an added bonus when that experience has roots in the Midwest.
One GROW Nebraska-affiliated company also has worked to commercialize the method of cream can cooking.
The Ogallala Cream Can Supper Co. was formed in 2009 by John Marquis and Phil Cone and, instead of importing aluminum vessels from China, the pair contracts with manufacturers in India to ship stainless steel vessels to the U.S.
Marquis describes his cream can business as more of a side project that he manages in addition to a full-time endeavor running a business that manufactures bay rum, an aftershave product. The company sold about 600 cream cans in 2014.
Ogallala Cream Cans come in four sizes, the smallest of which Marquis said sell best in the winter. The largest model sells best in the summer.
Still, describing the practice to someone who has never heard of it remains a tricky part of the sales pitch, Marquis said.
“When you try to explain it to people they want to think it’s a soup or a stew. Unless you’ve had one before, it’s really hard to explain,” he said. “I just tell people it’s really tasty and very unique and a good way to feed a lot of people pretty cheaply.”
For people that have partaken in a cream can supper, however, the unspoken nostalgia can quickly jog one’s memory.
“These products are sort of an old-fashioned way of doing things, and that makes people happy,” Ehrke said. “My parents had one in their RV and they relished that for a lot of years.”
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Information from: Omaha World-Herald, https://www.omaha.com
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