Update: Jolly Good Soda was named 2024's Coolest Thing Made in Wisconsin.
There’s another election in Wisconsin this year for which voting ends at noon Thursday.
It’s the annual Coolest Thing Made in Wisconsin contest, sponsored by a state business group and a financial planning company. You can vote at madeinwis.com.
Two of this year’s four finalists are from southeastern Wisconsin
On a warm October afternoon in the basement workshop of his Menomonee Falls home, Gregg Haensgen is talking ice fishing. With good reason. He’s used what he learned as a UW-Milwaukee engineering student, and at subsequent technology jobs, and combined that with his love of angling. Haensgen and his small company, Vulture Systems, have created the Revo.
It’s a battery-powered wireless sensor about the size of a cigarette lighter that can be mounted on a common ice fishing device, called a tip-up. When activated, it sends a signal to a handheld receiver — alerting an ice fisher when a fish has got its mouth around the underwater bait or a lure.
Haensgen demonstrates by pulling on a spool of fishing line under a mock tip-up and triggering the spring-loaded flag. Beeping ensues.
And recently Haensgen added to Revo a second alarm or spin alert, if the fish starts to pull away. Imagine more urgent beeping.
Haensgen explains that many anglers no longer just sit over a hole in the ice and wait for a fish to come by — even the anglers who use an underwater camera.
“In Wisconsin, you can have three lines and you’ll have a lot of guys who will be watching their camera and jigging and concentrating on that. They can put two tip-ups up, and our product will tell them immediately when it goes up and they don’t have to sit there and multitask," he says.
The handheld device can also send a signal back to the sensor for two-way verification of being within range or even send to a smartphone app.
Haensgen says Revo and its instant alert system is not just a device to help take home more fish. “I like to do a lot of catch and release. So, you have a lot better opportunity to release them as well. If they swallow the hook, that fish could die.”
So, Revo is for cold weather. But what makes it cool?
"I've got to know a lot of people in the industry and Wisconsin is a tip-up capital, I would call it. It's definitely a Wisconsin thing," Haensgen says.
So too is another of this year’s Coolest Thing Made in Wisconsin finalists.
Imagine, dear reader, a loud whirring sound, as twelve-ounce aluminum cans spin through a large silver machine about the size of a typical living room. The machine is called a filler and can fill at least 800 cans per minute with liquid coming through overhead tubes.
We’re inside the Krier Foods plant in Random Lake, forty miles north of Milwaukee. Krier makes Coolest Thing finalist Jolly Good soda.
In a conference room, marketing manager Nicole Depies explains Jolly Good is only 1% of the product produced by this 111-year-old beverage company, which mainly does contract work for other brands.
She says the soda dates back to when Krier also produced canned vegetables: “Jolly Good was brought by our third-generation owner in the late '60s as a way to keep his employee working through the off-vegetable season times.”
But Depies says about 17 years ago, Krier decided the retail market for soft drinks had become so crowded that it was hard for a company with about 100 employees to compete with the likes of Coke and Pepsi. Krier stopped making Jolly Good.
Ten years ago, Depies says, the new fifth-generation company president decided to bring back the brand to honor the recently deceased fourth-generation Krier.
“And so we slowly increased our footprint. We dropped a pallet at a local gas station. People heard about it and the rest is history, and now we’re everywhere again. We just launched nationally and on Amazon. So, the sky’s the limit," she says.
Depies contends the Jolly Good comeback — and nostalgia — are what makes a can of soda, cool. “Anytime we go to a trade show or an event, everyone has a story to tell us about their experience with our brand."
Depies says a Krier family member is still involved with the company, though a Texas-based private equity firm bought Krier a few years ago. She says the equity firm brought resources to help Krier scale up. The firm is hiring.
By the way, Depies has a fun sign off to her emails—"Have a JOLLY GOOD day." She explains, “Everyone always says 'Have a good day' or 'Sincerely,' but around here we just want you to have a Jolly Good day,”
The other two Coolest Thing Made in Wisconsin finalists this year are a lawn tractor with a tighter turning radius made by John Deere in Horicon and military medals produced by Medalcraft Mint in Green Bay,
