College of Business Food & Ag

President and owner of Maud Borup, Christine Lantinen ’98 headlined the annual Richard Schmitz Food Entrepreneurship lecture series

Christine Lantinen grew up in Le Center, Minn., which has a population of about 2,500 people. She’s a U.S. Army veteran, having served 10 years as a reservist, even while she was a marketing and public relations double major at Minnesota State Mankato.

When Lantinen got her first big promotion with Target in her 20s – a promotion that would take her overseas working with major corporations – she remembers not even having a passport or a credit card with more than a $500 limit.

She’s also a fifth-generation farmer’s daughter, a wife of 14 years to Randy, and a mother of two middle-schoolers.

How are all of these little tidbits relevant to her being the 2023 featured speaker of the Richard Schmitz Food Entrepreneurship Lecture Series? Because many students in the College of Business have similar backgrounds, and that makes it easier for them to envision experiencing the same success that she has now: as the president and owner of Maud Borup, a wholesale manufacturer specializing in gourmet candy, confections and snacks that is on track to surpass $50 million in sales this year.

“We’ll be at $100 million in a couple of years,” she said.

The path to candy land

After graduation from Minnesota State Mankato, Lantinen worked as a Target Sourcing Services account manager in Minneapolis for two years before moving on to a food gift company in the Twin

Cities as a sales and marketing director for four years.

In 2005, the opportunity to purchase Maud Borup came about. The owners were a chocolate supplier she knew from the past.

“I loved the story of Maud. It has such a rich history. I loved that a woman started the company in 1907 in St. Paul. There was all this legacy I wanted to hold onto and preserve and continue,” Lantinen said. “I met the owner for coffee on a Saturday, and I saw an opportunity to bring higher-end chocolate and confections into the seasonal space, which was a growing area in stores. I walked away with a handshake agreement to purchase the company that Saturday, and on Monday I was contacting buyers that I was going out on my own.”

Lantinen took all of the sales, sourcing and marketing knowledge she’d learned over the years, as well as the numerous contacts she had made in the industry, and applied it to her new venture. She took a company that had $100,000 in revenue and achieved $2.5 million in sales that first year by shifting the focus to wholesale and selling products to Whole Foods, Sam’s Club and Target, among other retailers and brands.

“I learned a lot about myself in that first year of business. I heard ‘No’ a lot being a young female out asking banks for close to a million dollars with no business plan,” said Lantinen, who only got the loan she needed to fill her orders after a friend of the family put up land as collateral.

But Lantinen stuck to her plan to keep Maud Borup privately owned and to trust that the business relationships and commitments from customers that she had would prove fruitful.

It worked. On average the company has experienced 30% growth each year since 2005. What began with two staff – Lantinen and Karen Edwards, chief communications officer, in the basement and garage has grown to 350 employees, which includes Lantinen's husband and mom, across three facilities. Their factories in Le Center (opened first in 2013 to honor her hometown roots), Plymouth, Minn., and Delafield, Wis., manufacture chocolate-enrobed and molded items, cotton candy and soft candies.

“With our facility in Le Center, we’ve done three additions on it, and we still own six acres of land to continue doing expansions,” Lantinen said.

Challenges and victories

As with any company, there are challenges. Maud Borup struggles to hire the staff it needs to operate at full capacity. Lantinen purchased the facilities in Delafield and Plymouth to break into new markets with fresh employee pools to draw from. They’ve also introduced automated production processes to help address the worker shortage.

The company is also continuously working on the important goals of maintaining a diverse and inclusive workforce and achieving zero percent landfill waste.

“About 80% of our workforce is made up of underrepresented groups,” Edwards said. “The majority of our employees are women, with many holding management positions.”

Lantinen is proud the company achieved B Corp certification, which evaluates a company’s social and environmental performance. Only 27 companies in Minnesota and 5,000 companies in the world are B Corp certified.

Lantinen’s awards over the years are numerous and include: 2019 Minnesota Small Business Person of the Year, Small Business Administration; 2019 and 2022 Fast 50 Companies, Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal; 2021 Dream Big Small Business of the Year Award Finalist, U.S. Chamber of Commerce; 2022

Entrepreneur of The Year Heartland, Ernst & Young; and 2022 ACG Minnesota Bold Award, Association for Corporate Growth.

Lantinen also enjoys giving back and working with students. She and Edwards partnered with Shane Bowyer, Ed.D., on his entrepreneur class and worked with students on “The Great Candy Challenge.” They identified the “next big candy” and worked through ideas for design, produc tion, packaging and market strategies.

With 150 candies that Maud Borup brought to market itself this year, one might think it would be hard for Lantinen to choose a favorite sweet treat. But that answer is an easy one.

“I like dark chocolate the best,” she said.