We at Muenster Milling have served our customers for 83 years now. The way we do that in the present day speaks for itself – we provide them high quality, trustworthy, locally sourced pet foods in stores and online. That’s the present day though. In today’s blog we’re going to take it back to the 1930s to see how Muenster Milling began, and how a farmer built a business out of nothing.
The business environment most of us are familiar with today was nowhere to be found in rural 1930s Texas. People who needed money didn’t produce for a big international company or try to join a successful tech startup.
This was a place and a time when making a fair living required hours and hours of hard work and ingenuity, as well as no small measure of patience and persistence. The American economy was marred by catastrophes such as the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. This was the world that Joe Felderhoff, our founder, lived in.
Joe Felderhoff began his career as a farmer in Muenster, Texas. He was considered to be quite the entrepreneur, and so it was in his nature to seek to break through “normal” farming and try his hand at something new. In 1932, he created Muenster Milling, but it was not the pet foods company it is today. Instead, it was a flour mill – a choice that was made to capitalize on the abundance of locally grown grains.
Soon, however, Joe would find that it was cheaper for him to buy flour in Kansas and drive it all the way back to Texas. This was a wonderful discovery, but it raised the question: what does one do with a flour milling business that no longer needs to make flour?
This was when a hugely important and company-defining change was made- Muenster Milling would no longer be a flour mill; it would now manufacture dairy feeds for animals. This set changes into motion that would shape the company’s entire future. Joe would continue to work hard at shaping Muenster Milling into a company that could earn a decent profit.
Eventually, the business began doing well and it looked like it might even become fairly profitable in the near future. Joe shared this with his 13 year old son Arthur after arriving home from work one day. Not long after this, Joe passed away in a fatal car crash. Arthur would remember what Joe had told him a few years later, and eventually he would take over control of the company over a decade later.
Thank you for taking the time to get to know a little more about the things that have made us who we are today. Next week, we will tell you about how Muenster Milling continued to develop after Joe’s passing away, as well as how Joe Felderhoff’s son Arthur carried the company into its next generation.
