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Duluth News Tribune | Monday, February 24, 2020
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DISTINGUISHED D U LUTH Celebrating Innovations, Opportunities and Cornerstones in Business
File / News Tribune
A PIPELINE OF TALENT
Clint Austin / caustin@duluthnews.com
Nicole Okstad welds a piece of aluminum at Moline Machinery in Duluth.
As workforce retires, Lake Superior College aims to fill manufacturing skills gap Tyler Schank / tschank@duluthnews.com
Freshman Benjamin Bijold uses a surface grinder to grind parallels at Lake Superior College on Thursday, Feb. 6. Bijold spent three hours working on the parallels the day before and planned to spend five hours that day.
By Jimmy Lovrien jlovrien@duluthnews.com
custom orders for national doughnut, pastry, bread and snack companies. The machines are massive — oline Machinery, some up to 200 feet long — with a family-owned everything needed to make the maker of industrial bakery item: from cutting and bakery equipment in shaping dough to frying and glazing Duluth’s Irving neighborhood, doughnuts. is just moving into its new Moline now has about 90 25,000-square-foot expansion. employees, with almost 50 of those A pingpong table sits on one side positions in the trades — assembly, of the wide-open space as computer machine tool operators, electricians numerical control (CNC) machines and more — and the others in CNC and other equipment recently moved programmer and engineer positions. from the company’s assembly But Moline has consistently been building across the street fills one hiring for most of the decade. corner of the space. “We’ve had a lot of retirements, “It does set us up for growth,” so we’re trying to keep up with said Dan Moline, vice president that, so there’s been a lot of of operations and the fourthhiring,” Moline said. generation family member working And it’s not alone. Other area there. “We weren’t able to grow manufacturers like Altec and before. Now we can.” Epicurean are facing similar In a typical year, the company PIPELINE: Page 3 might produce five or six machines,
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