The Lutheran Home Bell Plaine, MN

Creating customer loyalty is the ‘holy grail’ of any business enterprise.  Maintaining customer trust demands delivering service, value and integrity over an extended period of time.  It’s been our pleasure to work with The Lutheran Home: Belle Plaine, Minnesota since 1972 — first directly through our then direct sales rep, Doug Kronbeck, (also the founder of Kronbeck’s, a manufacturer’s rep firm serving the upper midwest) and since 1989 through our distributor partner, HILLYARD, based in Hutchinson, Minnesota.

One of the remarkable things about this partnership is the respective experience of each of the partners.  Anderson Chemical is less than a year away from celebrating its centennial mark.  HILLYARD observed theirs in 2007.  The Lutheran Home passed that August benchmark long before and now sports a heritage stretching back 112 years to 1898!

We’ll let Doug Kronbeck give a little history on how the relationship developed...

“We started to make calls on The Lutheran Home: Belle Plaine in the Fall of 1969.   In 1972 they wanted some help with bed sores, so we lowered the final pH of the linen from 10.5 to 7.2 and the bed sore problem was solved.  This was a great help to the whole staff — bed sores can be so hard and painful.  It was fun to be able to solve this problem.  This was when we used powders as detergents.  Most detergents were high in pH then, so we started to use liquid laundry products in this account.

Then we tackled another problem — we discovered ferris iron in the makeup water.  We solved this by using an iron removing sour.  After we installed the liquid system, the job of one person running back and forth filling the powder detergent hoppers was eliminated saving $10,000! (They did find her a new job.)

In the early 1990’s, we turned this account over to Hillyard with Jeff Hagg working the account. Later Jeff turned the account over to Jim Bruhn.  He has done a very fine job. Hillyard also has an excellent chemical technician, Scott Lindell.  He services the kitchen and laundry making sure they have supplies and that things are in good working order.

The Lutheran Home: Belle Plaine has been buying products from Anderson Chemical and Hillyard for over 37 years.  The Lutheran Home: Belle Plaine’s Mission Statement is revealing about the approach they take to serving their guests:  “In Christ’s love...to provide for the spiritual, physical, mental and emotional needs of people entrusted to our care.” 


We, and our partners at Hillyard, like to take a similar tact when providing service to our customers — a Big Picture, all-encompassing effort to provide a full array of products and services.  These are designed to deliver genuine value with the goal of insuring quality results through leading edge chemistry,  training, support services and technical assistance.

We deem it a privilege to have been partners with The Lutheran Home of Belle Plaine these many years.  We’re working hard to continually improve the technologies and services that underpin that trust that is essential in all long-term relationships.

Through an ongoing joint effort by all three parties there is no reason why we can’t be reading a similar article 37 years from now.