St. Joseph manufacturing plant increases production, workers

ST. JOSEPH – Adam Hansen launched his own cabinetry business 20 years ago, when he was just 21 years old and had $1,500 to invest. In the intervening two decades, it steadily grew — initially from A-Cab Custom Woodworking (when it employed, well, him) to Hansen & Company Woodworks a few years ago, when he reached 60 employees running three different divisions in architectural millwork, stone countertop fabrication and metalworks/upholstery.

Now, he’s broken ground on what will perhaps be his single biggest expansion yet — a 92,000-square-foot facility that will replace most of the five existing buildings the company uses in a business park along Pearl Drive. Construction on the new facility is under way less than a mile to the northwest, along Stearns County Road 133. And, perhaps most significantly, the $20-million investment will include seven robotic machines that will help revolutionize capacity for casework manufacturing and add staff.

When the building becomes operational by next March, and after the new machines ramp up to begin production in 2026, Hansen expects to hire an additional six to nine people. Along with the automation of repetitive processes, the extra capacity will allow Hansen & Company to increase its daily cabinet output from 150 to 500 per day — a leap of 400%.

“The human factor in our business is going to be more important than ever,” said Hansen, who is president of the company at 42 — long since he first worked in commercial floor covering as a teenager with his father. “If one of those machines goes down, you’ve got a tremendous capital investment that’s not producing, and you don’t want any outages to be very long. That’s why we’re going to educate our staff, likely with the assistance of technical college instructors and representatives from the machine manufacturers. We want all of our people to grow mentally and emotionally with us. The physicality of the machines is going to make our output grow exponentially, but it wouldn’t be possible without the brains of the people to run the machines. You can’t buy that.”

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Hansen & Company has set aside $120,000 to help fund educational programs and training that will help existing staff develop skills in industrial engineering, robotics, process engineering and technical manufacturing. The advanced skills will create opportunity for a 20% wage increase, Hansen said. Automation will allow for the transfer of frameless cabinet parts through a production line with little human intervention until they reach the pre-assembly stage for two shifts of staff through a four-day work week.

Bremer Bank, which is supporting the expansion, and St. Joseph city officials have been integral to the expansion, Hansen said. Mayor Rick Schultz, City Administrator David Murphy, Community Development Director Nate Keller and the city council helped engineer tax increment financing for the project. Bremer Bank has worked with Hansen & Company for several years in an advisory capacity preparatory to making the investment. Hansen said he resisted capital expenditures during that time to be ready to make the financing work and that no other public grant or subsidy is involved.

Hansen & Company, which has called St. Joseph home for 19 years after outgrowing its first location in Waite Park, has created a niche as a supplier that goes directly to general contractors serving the higher-end multifamily market. While much business in the past has come within Minnesota, the expansion is designed to serve as a springboard for national sales. Hansen said the company is the only frameless cabinetry provider for multifamily housing projects in the Midwest. He said the Great Recession and COVID-19 provided challenges; the company persevered by serving projects in the Bakken region of North Dakota and later focusing on senior housing and greater degrees of automation.

Chateau Waters in Sartell is an example of a senior living facility that has used Hansen & Company cabinetry, and a transition to a thermally fused laminate has also facilitated the move to automation and greater scale.

Some of Hansen’s new machines will come from Germany, Austria and Italy, where he traveled to inspect technology otherwise unavailable in the United States. By pairing the company with people in Central Minnesota, he believes the framework will be in place to grow manufacturing for the foreseeable future.

“Some of the factories I visited were ridiculous,” Hansen said, citing one in Germany that turned out materials for 4,000 kitchens per day. “That got my wheels turning. We started at just looking at automating routing and unloading. That was going to cost $4 million, but we never stopped asking questions, and the more we asked, the more we found we could increase our numbers. I love manufacturing, and this isn’t going to be the kind of work you find in some dingy factory. This is manufacturing for the next generation and we think people will find it attractive – our customers and our employees.”