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GRAND RAPIDS - So how does a bespectacled, bow-tied lawyer and college professor living in North Carolina wind up running a nut and confectionery business in the Midwest?
He was born into the Koeze family in Grand Rapids.
And that's one of the reasons Jeffrey Koeze presides over Koeze Company, or Koeze's, now in its busiest time of year.
The number of employees has swelled to 100 from the springtime level of 35 and the plant at 1263 Burton St. SW is humming, because the majority of the 90-year-old company's sales are corporate holiday gifts presented to employees and clients. Koeze's main product is cashews, sold in big glass decanters, though it also offers other nuts, fancy chocolates and caramels.
The Grand Rapids firm also recently landed a contract with Northwest Airlines to supply its business class travelers with nuts. The one-year pact will significantly bump Koeze's production, but current pan-time employees will pick up extra hours to handle the work.
Koeze said the company uses mail order and fundraising organizations and its retail store - to get to the business gift market. The mail-order and fund-raising divisions each account for about 45 percent of sales, and the retail store, located in front of the manufacturing plant, the remaining 10 percent.
Every kind of not-for-profit group imaginable uses Koeze's products for fund-raisers.
"Our products are absolutely the best you can get of their kind, in my opinion," Koeze said. "They carry adult prices and it's an adult product. Our idealgroup would be a service club typically of professionals and business people who are going to use these as gifts...