12-day business empires: Inside the Minnesota State Fair’s biggest vendors

Jen Finger was decked out in green. Green nails, green Apple Watch band, a bright green pickle on her shirt.

"I try to go all out," Jen laughed. "I usually wear my pickle earrings, too."

Jen is the marketing director of the Perfect Pickle, one of the Minnesota State Fair's flagship vendors. For twelve days every August and September, she and her team sell beer-battered pickle chips to some of the nearly 2 million people who pass through the fairgrounds — and by the time the gates close for the last time, the Perfect Pickle will have made its money for the entire year.

That's not an exaggeration. Ask Greg Klindt, one of the stand's three owners, what a bad hour looks like during the fair—he does not mince words.

"A business day for us is like a business month for somebody else," Klindt said. "If we have a problem where we can't process credit cards for an hour, that's like being down for a week."

The Minnesota State Fair is famous for its excess, a veritable mecca for everything fried and everything on a stick. But behind the food and the crowds is quite an unorthodox economy: Many of the fair's biggest vendors are, functionally, 12-day businesses. They spend the majority of the year preparing for a stretch of time shorter than most people's summer vacation, and if anything goes wrong during it, there's no next quarter to make it up.

Klindt started the stand with two of his longtime friends back in 1997. Their first event was the Saint Anthony Art Festival, churning out fried pickles from a 10-by-15 tent with one deep fryer. Now, almost 30 years later, the friends own and operate a bona fide pickle empire at the Minnesota State Fair, blazing through five semi-truck loads of pickles, 11,000 lbs of batter, and 125 kegs of beer in under two weeks. And with two sprawling buildings and 300 seasonal employees (primarily local high schoolers), their current set-up certainly dwarfs their rinky-dink tent back in ‘97.

Klindt won't say how much the Perfect Pickle actually makes, but a Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal ranking of 2024 vendor revenue put the Perfect Pickle fourth among all fair vendors, at $1.5 million. Spread across twelve days, that's roughly $125,000 worth of pickles a day.

Getting there takes months of preparation most fairgoers never think about. Klindt places his pickle order four months in advance — at his volume, there's no other option. A distributor can't absorb an order that size on short notice; the pickles have to be grown for it. "They actually plant their pickle fields based on what I order in advance," Klindt said.

That kind of scale cuts both ways. It's what makes the Perfect Pickle one of the fair's top earners, and it's also what makes a bad hour catastrophic. Most businesses can absorb a rough patch — a slow Tuesday, a broken register, a delayed shipment — and make it up over the following weeks. The Perfect Pickle doesn't have following weeks. "Everything's going 100 miles an hour, and everybody's crammed into tight spaces," Klindt said. If a fryer goes down, there's no waiting for a replacement part. "It's not like I can order parts and wait for it to come in a week," he said. "Our year's over in a week."

For Klindt and his fellow owners at The Perfect Pickle, the fair is the job. Their only job. For other vendors, though, it’s a side hustle.

Dan Wozniak spends most of the year as an attorney for a large sales organization in the Twin Cities. Every August, he takes twelve days of PTO to work a second job that's arguably harder than his first.

"PTO," he said, "to work sixteen-hour days."

Wozniak is the co-owner of Fresh French Fries, another Minnesota Fair phenom that operates at a staggering speed and volume. Wozniak’s father and uncle opened the stand in the 1970s, and, much like the Perfect Pickle, Fresh French Fries started small—a single, tiny booth by the midway. Photos of that first stand still hang on the walls of the Fresh French Fries upstairs office; Wozniak has worked at some version of the Fresh French Fries since he was ten years old.

The scale of Fresh French Fries is easy to state and hard to picture. In twelve days, the stand and its roughly 130-strong seasonal workforce (again, composed mostly of 9th-12th graders) go through 400,000 pounds of potatoes, 23,000 pounds of oil, and 25,000 pounds of ketchup. Wozniak and his crew spend most of their weekends in the two months before the fair scrubbing, repairing, and restocking a stand that will, for twelve days, run at a pace that makes sales litigation feel like a cake walk.

The Perfect Pickle and Fresh French Fries are hardly alone in their financial success at the fair. Fourth and fifth on that 2024 revenue list, they sit well behind the fair’s number one earner: Sweet Martha's Cookie Jar, which pulled in $4.9 million in 2024 across three locations selling nothing but buckets of chocolate chip cookies.

Ask Wozniak what actually makes 12 days like this possible, and the answer isn't charm, or luck, or even the fries. It's the two months of weekends nobody sees.

"It's a lot of just little things you would never expect," Wozniak said. "We're usually here every weekend for two months beforehand."

Multiply that by every vendor on these fairgrounds — the pickle order placed four months out, the pallets of ketchup, the deep fryers scrubbed clean in June — and the fair's twelve days start to look less like a lucky window and more like the payoff of an entire year's arithmetic. The fair runs through Labor Day, Sep. 7. If you're anywhere nearby, go get a bucket of fries or a basket of pickle chips — and spare a thought for the four months, and the year, that went into it.