Our Vitality

the backbones of two successful Eau Claire manufacturers that began at the homes of their creators and today have become important players in their respective fields.

Realityworks began as Baby Think It Over on the West Coast in the garage of Rick and Mary Jurmain. There, Rick, a former NASA engineer, built a prototype of what would become the company’s first baby simulator used in schools across the country to teach students about the responsibility of being a parent.

Chip Magnet, an Eau Claire salsa and relish company, began in the kitchen of Alexis Lucas in central Wisconsin. Lucas learned from her grandmother the joys of making salsa. Later, after the family moved to Eau Claire, Lucas would make and sell salsa at farmers markets to supplement the family’s income.

In 1993, Rick and Mary Jurmain were living in the San Diego area and were watching a public television show about how young people were being taught about the responsibilities of being a parent.

“They were watching a PBS special about using sacks of flour to simulate taking care of babies,” said Samantha Forehand, marketing communications manager for Realityworks. The couple had a good laugh at that, she said, and Mary Jurmain then challenged her husband, recently laid off from his NASA engineering job, to do better.

“He went out to his garage and tinkered around and came up with the first prototype of a baby known as Baby Think It Over,” Forehand said. “As you can imagine it, teachers just loved it because it was so much better than what was out there. So that’s really the birth of Baby Think It Over.”

The Jurmains decided to move their fledgling company to Eau Claire to be closer to family. Now known as Realityworks, the company has called Eau Claire home since 1996. Like many emerging manufacturers, the company was in Banbury Place for a number of years before moving to its present home on Mondovi Road on the city’s west side two decades ago.

“They were building a company that started with that one product,” said Jessica Bierman, Realityworks human resources director, about the simulator that would become known as RealCare Baby. “But this is where they wanted to grow that company.”

Grow it did. By the time the company celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2020, officials said that 10 million people had used the company’s products, and the babies were used by more than 32,000 educational and social service organizations. After the company became Realityworks, its owners knew that they had to expand its product lines to remain viable.

“Realityworks is constantly coming out with new products,” Forehand said, and has branched out to make educational products in the fields of agriculture, trade skills, health science, and career and technical education. That transition began about a decade ago, she added.

“We had to look within our own market and (figure out) what else are we good at and what can we expand into,” Forehand said. A natural progression was into the area of career and technical education, she said, and the company now sells products for virtual welding, ECG simulation, nursing simulation and even for bovine birthing simulation.

When considering new products, Forehand and Bierman said, the company relies on experts in the field for advice on design and curriculum.

“We want to make sure the products we are coming out with mean something to educators,” Forehand said. “We don’t just come up with crazy ideas. We actually use educators to tell us what their students are not understanding” or what tool they need to teach a particular skill.

“So, the educators are really important in that product development portion of our company,” Forehand said.

Many of the products that Realityworks brings out can be used in a number of settings, Forehand said. For example, the virtual welder can be used not only for students looking for a career in the trades, she said, but also for those intent on a career in agriculture.

The company went through significant changes beginning in 2003 with the name change to Realityworks. The Jurmains stepped away from the day-to-day operations of the company in 2005, and the company began an employee stock ownership plan in 2011. Realityworks would become a full 100 percent ESOP company in 2021.

Bierman said the transition to a company fully owned by its employees happened as more of the company was purchased from the Jurmains until 2021. “So now our employees own the company,” she said.

An external trustee manages the ESOP, she said.

A new employee will start accumulating shares in the company after being with Realityworks for a year. www.eauclairechamber.org

“What we tell employees is, as we grow the company, and the longer you are here, you’re going to continue to accumulate shares,” Bierman said. “And if we’re doing everything right, the share value is going to continue to increase, so you are building wealth over time.”

Forehand said that as the Jurmains were looking at what the future would hold for Realityworks, “they really put a lot of value into the employees,” and decided that giving the company back to the employees through the ESOP was the right direction for the company.

Realityworks was named the 2023 Wisconsin Employee-Owned Company of the Year. The award was presented by the Wisconsin Chapter of The ESOP Association.

Bierman said it is important at Realityworks for management to be transparent with the employees, adding, “it’s a big part of our culture to encourage that employee ownership mentality.”

Culture comes up a lot in talking to Realityworks employees, and Bierman said both the ESOP and their line of products contribute to the vitality that employees feel at the company.

“One of the main things that our employees will tell you attracts and keeps them here is people feel good about the culture, what we are doing and why we are doing it and the role that we play in education,” Bierman said.

Forehand said Realityworks will continue to expand into the areas where it is still a relatively new player. Pointing to the company’s entry into the healthcare market, she said, “we are still fairly new within that…we’ve only been in there about six years.”

“Part of our strategy is to just look for other ways of servicing our markets,” Bierman said.

From her earliest days, Alexis Lucas can remember watching her grandmother in central Wisconsin make salsa: peeling, blanching and canning tomatoes and preparing the spices and other ingredients that would render the perfect salsa.

“She taught me everything,” Lucas said of her grandmother while sitting in the Banbury Place office of Chip Magnet, Lucas’ salsa and relish company that in 12 years has become a presence in an estimated 4,200 stores in 42 states and Canada. “Her kitchen always smelled like food.”

Holding up a jar of one of Chip Magnet’s most popular salsa, Mildly Delicious, Lucas said her grandmother “made this salsa.” Lucas said she always had the salsa-making bug, calling it “this magical creation” that would emerge from her grandmother’s kitchen. “It was always delicious.”

Even as a teenager, Lucas said, she would make salsas for her family’s enjoyment. “So, I would just start experimenting,” Lucas said, making three to four different varieties. “It’s so versatile. You can do so many things with it. I had a lot of recipes under my belt.”

Lucas said that despite how ingrained making salsa was in her life, it never occurred to her that it could become a business – until life intruded. As Lucas explains it, the family moved from the Wausau area to Eau Claire in 2009 when her husband Jim took a finance position with a car dealership. “I didn’t want to move,” Alexis conceded.

“I’ve always been a stay-at-home mom,” she said, but it became clear that the family would need some supplemental income.

“I thought maybe I’d make salsa and sell it at farmers markets,” she remembers telling her husband, who didn’t think much of the plan at first.

“I went behind his back” to get the business going, she said, taking food safety classes and buying the first four cases of jars in which to pack the salsa.

That was in summer 2011. The first 48 jars of salsa went to a farmers market on the Chippewa Valley Technical College parking lot, Lucas said. “I had to hand write the ingredients on every single jar,” Lucas said. “I sold every single jar of salsa.”

Word quickly spread about the new salsa, Lucas said, with it developing a “cult following from the farmers market.”

A big step forward for the fledgling company came in June 2012 when it became licensed to produce and sell food. “You have to be licensed to sell retail,” Lucas said. At that time, she said, it was taking about 3,000 pounds of tomatoes a week to produce enough salsa to satisfy the local farmers markets. The company put its salsa in its first stores in 2012 and made the move to selling only in retail outlets in 2013.

The first employees were hired in 2012, Lucas said, because the volume of salsa needed to satisfy the demand was so big “there was no way I could do it myself.”

The company moved to Banbury Place in 2014, a move Lucas said was made as easy as possible by the building’s owner, Jack Kaiser, who she said bent over backwards to work with the startup. “I can’t say enough good about him,” Lucas said of Kaiser. (Kaiser and Banbury Place were featured in the summer/fall 2022 edition of EC Life.)

Those early days were a whirlwind of making product and convincing stores to give up valuable shelf space for this new salsa made in a former tire plant in Eau Claire, Wis.

“We had to put boots on the ground,” Lucas said of their sales technique. “We had to take samples to every single grocery store we would stop at.”

A former family nanny made the transition to sales manager, Lucas said, which turned out so well he is still with the company. Eventually, the first salsas appeared on store shelves in Eau Claire, Madison, Milwaukee and the Twin Cities. This, of course, meant that someone had to drive the product to these locations.

In 2014, Lucas’ husband Jim quit his job and joined the business. The couple’s two sons now work for Chip Magnet, which has four non-family employees as well.

Since day one, Chip Magnet has been all about fresh ingredients and ensuring that its products are free of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). As Lucas told an interviewer in 2015, “Why would you make food to sell that you wouldn’t eat? I couldn’t do it. I believe in eating real food.”

In 2015, Chip Magnet entered into an agreement with United Natural Foods or UNFI, a nationwide distributor of natural, organic and specialty foods.

“That was huge,” Lucas said of being accepted by UNFI, because it then gave Chip Magnet national reach. Before working with the distributor, she said, “we were self-delivering everything” that the company sold. “I don’t know how we did it.”

Gradually, Chip Magnet came to rely on distributors to get its products to the grocery stores and less on the old minivan that served as the company’s distribution vehicle. Someone still has to drive to Madison to the Willy Street Co-op, one of Chip Magnet’s first customers, that wants a relish that isn’t available through a distributor, Lucas said with a laugh.

So where did the Chip Magnet name come from? It was a play on the term “chick magnet,” Lucas said. “It just hit me,” she said, “Chip Magnet. That’s it.”

In recent years, Chip Magnet has gotten into the private label market, including for the Lunds & Byerlys chain in Minnesota. A game changer, she said, would be to become a private label supplier for a major national chain like Costco. Despite the company’s growth, Lucas said, there are no plans to leave Eau Claire.

“We love Eau Claire,” she said. “Why would we leave? It’s not a big city. It’s close to the Twin Cities. It’s progressive. I think it’s a great spot.” Lucas said that her grandmother would be “amazed” at what Chip Magnet has become.

“We built this entire thing because she taught me how to peel tomatoes and how to make salsa,” Lucas said.