“I came from a small town, smaller than Monticello. I believe in small towns.”
MinnTex Citrus celebrated 40 years in business last fall.
The business, co-owned by husband-and-wife team Bud and Georgia Johnson, has three full-time employees and 60 to 70 seasonal employees.
When asked if he thought MinnTex would still be going strong 40 years later, Johnson laughs.
“It’s such a unique business. It wasn’t a business to get into. We were just trying to survive at the time.
“(When) Somebody starts a job, they don’t think, ‘Am I going to do it for 40 years?’” continued Johnson. “I don’t know if anybody really sets out to do that as a career.”
In 2010, Mike Schemmel joined the company. Tiffany Rave came on 2011; and Morgan Stogdill started in 2020.
Their seasonal employees mainly work from after Thanksgiving through mid-December. Fruit starts coming in after Thanksgiving break. Seasonal help works to sort, pack, and put orders together, preparing them for shipment.
“It all happens in two to three weeks,” explained Johnson. “We have to be done around Dec. 16-18, depending on when Thanksgiving is. So we can start the Monday after Thanksgiving and whatever the calendar gives us, that’s all the time we have. The goal is to have it delivered before Christmas break. Barring any weather circumstances, we have to be done.”
MinnTex “specializes in meeting your fresh fruits and cheese/sausage fundraising needs. We take pride in offering our customers high-quality products at a reasonable price – a combination that is unique in the fundraising business.”
The majority of MinnTex’s customers are high school FFA chapters throughout Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.
While MinnTex started in Monticello in 1983, the Johnson family business stems back a few years beyond that.
In 1978, Bud Johnson’s father, Maynard, purchased several hundreds of acres of citrus groves in southern Texas.
“Our father was never one to sit still, and traveling through the Texas countryside, he was intrigued by the citrus groves there were for sale,” reads MinnTex’s website.
With so much fruit growing, the Johnsons needed a way to get rid of their crop.
“Up here (in Iowa),” there’s a constant market for your corn and soybeans,” Johnson said during a 2012 interview with the Monticello Express. “Down there (in Texas), you’re at the mercy of the packing sheds. And we were having trouble getting our crop harvested. We kind of learned the hard way how to raise and grow citrus.”
While they are two separate businesses now, in 1981, MinnTex founded its first location in Minnesota by Johnson’s brother. This is where the company got its name, MinnTex.
Today, the next generation of the Johnson family has taken over that location with the name myfruitsale.com.
“We don’t work together. We’re totally independent of each other,” Johnson clarified.
When Maynard passed away and the citrus groves were sold, Johnson moved to Monticello and started his own branch of the family business.
“My first years, we just sold grapefruit and oranges; two things,” recalled Johnson. “Now we have 45 items in different sizes and varieties and things. Not just fruit, but meats and cheeses. We source cheese out of Wisconsin. We use some Iowa products as well.”
In the mid-1980s, meats and cheeses were added to the array of products. In 2003, they added different assortments of nuts.
MinnTex started out in a 400-square-foot rented facility in Monticello and grew to a 55,000-square-foot facility today. The Johnsons purchased their current property in 1993 on John Drive, not far from Monticello’s industrial park area. Their initial facility was 14,000 square feet. Five additions were added over the years.
“Every year we kept growing, kept getting more customers,” Johnson was quoted as saying in 2012.
In the beginning, MinnTex survived off of a handful of accounts selling their products. Today, it’s several hundred.
MinnTex prides itself on following its mission “to provide our customers with a strategic combination of three things: Quality, Value, and Service.”
In terms of quality, it’s all about the freshest products.
“Our vendors know that our standards are high, and our experience had taught us who we can trust to provide the level of quality we desire for our customers.”
Value…Johnson said it’s all about not selling overpriced products “for the sake of supporting an organization.”
“Our desire is to provide you with a program that our customers will look forward to years after year,” notes MinnTex’s website.
MinnTex exists to help young people raise money for their organizations, providing that top-notch service.
“We’ve been around for over 40 years and service many different organizations each year. Our desire is to invest in long-term relationships with our customers, and to help them meet their fundraising needs by selling quality products at a good value.”
With the price of everything on the rise, MinnTex has not been immune from an increase in cost. However, the biggest disruption is weather and the climate.
“Mother Nature, probably more than anything, determines our pricing,” Johnson said.
If there is a freeze in Texas, that causes a reduction in the size of the crop of oranges, for example. On the flip side, if there is a surplus of oranges, the price might come down a bit.
“It also depends on what the grade is,” added Johnson. “Two years ago, there was more choice (grade) oranges on the trees because there was more wind scar and stuff. So the crop was the same, but because there was more choice and less fancies, which is what we buy, the price went up. Not due to crop size, just the fact of how it was grading out.”
In 2012, MinnTex was recognized by the NAAE (National Association of Agricultural Educators) with the Outstanding Cooperation award, one of six companies nationwide.
MinnTex has also contributed toward the construction of the FFA Enrichment Center in Ankeny, Iowa, as a “Sharing with Pride” executive partner.
Over the past 40 years, Johnson said the size of the average family has gotten smaller, resulting in students selling less products.
“You used to sell maybe two boxes of 40 pounds of fruit to a family. Now they’re maybe buying half a box,” he said. “Twenty years ago, there were schools that would buy a semi-load who are maybe buying four pallets today. That has definitely changed through the years.”
COVID changed the way MinnTex, and a lot of companies, do business. What used to be face-to-face sales and visiting schools throughout the Midwest has resulted in Zoom calls. Though, MinnTex does attend the annual Iowa FFA Leadership Conference in Ames to meet with students, teachers, and FFA advisors.
“It’s all about the interaction,” Johnson said. “My first year I was in business, I was told to get a toll-free number and cold call everybody. They don’t know who you are; there’s no face-to-face. So the next year I was out knocking on doors and made that personal step and visited with people. Maybe that would lay the ground work for the next year. We made an effort through all the years to be face-to-face as much as possible. They know us; we know them.”
Fifteen years ago, in 2010, the Johnsons built and opened the Eastern Iowa Sports Facility (EISF), taking up unused space within their MinnTex facility. The Johnsons’ love of sports, particularly baseball and softball, led to the start of the EISF.
The goal was to give young athletes “a chance to improve their skills without them having to drive to bigger cities” where similar facilities exist.
“It’s a nice thing to do for the community,” remarked Johnson. “Now with tournaments, we’re busy on Saturdays. We have locals who come in and use the fields. Teams come from all over the place.
“They stay at our hotel, which is blessing to have that,” he continued. “When they come from farther away, they make it an overnight trip and spend money in town. A couple restaurants, they know when tournament days are and we let them know because they’ll get busy. It’s neat to bring people to town.”
This off-season opportunity sees teams from as far aways as Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, Sioux City, and St. Louis.
“It was important to us to give area youth the same opportunities as those afforded youth in urban communities,” Johnson was quoted as saying in the Express in 2010.
“We want the kids to have a place they can use to further their abilities and give them a chance,” added Georgia Johnson, also during a 2010 interview with the Express. “This place was more than just a vision; it as something we wanted to do for the area.
So are the Johnsons anticipating retiring any time soon?
“Yeah, definitely,” Johnson said. “We’re trying to work on a transition, absolutely.”
They built a home in Manchester and are spending less time in Arizona due to the heat.
“As we transition out of the business, it forces me to go home,” Johnson said. “We’re still close enough to get here. Eventually when we do sell it, it won’t be as hard. I’m not driving by every day looking at the business saying, ‘That was my building.’ It’s going to be hard…”