In rich alluvial soil where cotton once was king, the stove now reigns. Since its founding in 1984, homegrown Viking Range Corp. has built a global business in Greenwood, Miss., become the area's premier employer and helped create an island of relative prosperity in what locals often describe as the poorest region in the nation's poorest state.Federal Reserve District, 8th ; Mississippi

Susan C. Thomson

English

Research Papers in Economics

community pro file
recipe for Success 
Kitchen company Keeps town’s economy cooking
I
n rich alluvial soil where cotton once was king, the stove now reigns.   
Since its founding in 1984, homegrown Viking Range Corp. has 
built a global business in Greenwood, Miss., become the area’s premier 
employer and helped create an island of relative prosperity in what   
locals often describe as the poorest region in the nation’s poorest state.   
By Susan C. Thomson
Besides being the top manufacturer and employer in Greenwood, Miss., Viking Range Corp. has been the leader in rejuvenating downtown.  
Its headquarters (above) occupies two square blocks facing the Yazoo River where cotton traders once did business. 
The Regional Economist  |  www.stlouisfed.org   23The seed for this success story was 
planted by the wife and customers of local 
homebuilder Fred Carl.  They kept asking 
him for restaurant-style ranges for their 
home kitchens.
Carl conceived and made one.  All man-
ner of variations on it followed, as did 
dozens of other Viking appliances, includ-
ing disposers, trash compactors, microwave 
ovens, refrigerators and dishwashers.  Now, 
the founder presides over what he proudly 
calls an “all-kitchen” company, its brand 
most recently extended to cookware, cutlery 
and countertop appliances, designed in 
Greenwood and made in Europe or China.
Except for these newer, smaller items, 
almost everything with the Viking name 
on it is produced in one of the company’s 
four plants and shipped from its worldwide 
distribution center, all in Greenwood.
The company’s growth has helped take up 
some of the job slack created by the flight of 
other employers, two of them in the early 
2000s.  First, Baldwin Piano Co. pulled up 
stakes, laying off the last 275 employees of 
a workforce that once topped 1,000.  Soon, 
National Picture & Frame Co.’s two Green-
wood plants and their 475 jobs had disap-
peared, as well.
 
Incentives for Business
Since then, Greenwood has welcomed the 
arrival of the smaller plants of Raybestos 
Products Co., which makes brake and clutch 
products, and Milwaukee Electric Tool 
Corp., which makes power hand tools.  Both 
companies received economic incentives to 
come, says Ronnie Robertson, a utility exec-
utive who chairs both the publicly funded 
Greenwood-Leflore Industrial Board and a 
private economic development foundation.
The two groups combine forces to lure new 
businesses from out of town.  Some are likely 
to be attracted by the county’s nonunion 
work environment.  Others are drawn in by 
federal, state and local grants, loans and tax 
breaks.  While declining to discuss specific 
cases, Robertson 
says the possi-
bilities for incen-
tives include 
federal loans for 
infrastructure 
improvements 
and state loans 
and grants for 
roads, utilities, 
building 
construction, 
workforce development and the cost of trans-
porting and installing special equipment. 
As a result of the state offerings, most new 
in the past five years, “we are aggressively 
competing with programs and incentives 
that are offered all across the country.”  
Robertson says.
A standard local offer of 10-year abate-
ment on real estate taxes to relocating 
companies extends at times to existing 
businesses.  Viking got it for the dishwasher 
plant it finished earlier this year, along with 
a $3 million state grant to build it.  The 
Leflore County, Miss., By the numbers
Total population ..........................................35,088 (1) 
  City of Greenwood  ...................................16,742 (2) 
Labor force ..................................................14,150 (3) 
Per capita personal income ......................$24,731 (4) 
Unemployment rate ...............................8 percent (5) 
High school graduates ......................61.9 percent (6) 
People living in poverty  ....................31.6 percent. (7) 
  (1)  U.S. Census Bureau, 2007. 
  (2)  U.S. Census Bureau, 2006. 
  (3)  Bureau of Labor Statistics, April 2008. 
  (4)  Bureau of Economic Analysis, 2006. 
  (5)  12-month average as of April 2008, compared 
      with 6.2 percent in Mississippi and 4.8 percent  
    for the United States.  SOURCE:  Mississippi  
    Department of Employment Security. 
  (6)  U.S. Census Bureau, 2000. 
  (7)  U.S. Census Bureau, 2004.  
  
Largest eMpLoyers:* 
Viking Range Corp. ............................................1,467
Greenwood Leflore County Hospital  ....................968
Mississippi Valley State University .......................543
Heartland Catfish .................................................400
America’s Catch ...................................................380
Milwaukee Electric Tool Corp  ...............................297
  *Self-reported spring 2008
At one of the Viking factories in town, employee  
Latonja Harris gives a final inspection to a range.  
Liz Lester, one of John-Richard’s 250 employees in 
Greenwood, applies gold leaf to a picture frame.  
Stanley Marshall, Heartland Catfish’s full-time flavor 
taster, does his job on a sample he’s just microwaved.  
Also at Heartland, an unidentified employee, swathed 
head-to-toe in her uniform, processes catfish.
Viking founder Fred Carl.
24   The Regional Economist  |  July 2008company also got a $1.3 million state loan 
to fix up an abandoned building it uses for 
parts distribution and a call center.  The 
company will own both buildings after leas-
ing them for 10 years.
Viking Doesn’t roam
Not that Viking needed any special 
enticement to stay put.  Other states have 
come courting, dangling inducements for 
pieces of the company’s expanding opera-
tions, but to no avail.  Carl, a white-haired 
and cheery man whose favorite term of dis-
approval is “dad-gum,” insists his company 
is not—and never will be—in play.
“It just doesn’t feel right.  It feels like I 
would be abandoning my hometown,” says 
Carl, the fourth generation of a home-build-
ing family in Greenwood.
Alex Malouf is no less a Greenwood loyalist.  
“I was born here and reared here, and I started 
the business here ... and it’s going to remain 
here forever,” he says.  His business is John-
Richard; it evolved from one local furniture 
store into a worldwide maker and seller of 
high-end home furniture and accessories.
The company operates a plant in Vietnam 
and subcontracts work to 17 different Asian 
manufacturers.  But almost all of its world-
wide production passes through its Green-
wood facilities, where employees also do 
some of the assembling and hand finishing. 
As employers, Greenwood Leflore Hos-
pital and Mississippi Valley State Univer-
sity, a 58-year-old historically black school 
with 3,000 students, also count among the 
major fixtures.  Another is the farm-raised 
catfish industry, which Robertson estimates 
employs more people in Leflore County 
than Viking does.
The county’s unemployment rate is one 
of the lowest among 14 counties in the 
state’s depressed Delta region—a region that   
consistently registers higher unemployment 
than the state and nation.  But stubbornly 
high poverty and low education rates com-
bine to limit the pool of job-ready workers. 
“The biggest money that’s spent around 
here is between January and March, when 
tax refund checks come out,” says Jim 
Quinn, senior vice president of Planters 
Bank & Trust of Greenwood.
His bank’s first name speaks to an area 
rooted in agriculture.  Cotton ruled from 
the early 1800s through about the 1930s. 
The latest statistics from the Greenwood-
based Staplcotn cotton growers co-op show 
soybeans leading all Leflore County crops, 
both in acres planted and the crop’s total 
market value.  By both measures, cotton has 
declined by more than half in just the past 
three years, the result also of rising corn 
production and prices.
Cotton remains “a big deal, as big a deal 
as any other crop,” says Meredith B. Allen, 
the co-op’s marketing vice president.  “It’s 
just not king anymore.”
Despite highway signs that still advertise 
Greenwood as the “cotton capital of the 
world,” that title now belongs somewhere in 
China, the world’s leading cotton-producing 
country these days, Allen says.
The Regional Economist  |  www.stlouisfed.org   25 ed.org   25Catfish Concerns
The soaring global demand driving 
Leflore County farmers into corn and 
soybeans—and, says Quinn, ensuring them 
profits for the first time in several years— 
is driving up costs for the county’s catfish 
farmers.  That’s because corn and soybeans 
are the main ingredients in catfish feed, 
those farmers’ biggest expense.  The price 
of that feed has risen by two-thirds over 
the past year, says Roger Barlow, presi-
dent of the Catfish Institute, which is also 
tracking and campaigning against a tide of 
imported catfish.
He speaks for a U.S. industry grown 
up since the early 1980s and centered in 
Mississippi.  Leflore County is home to a 
number of small operators and two large 
producers—America’s Catch and Heartland 
Catfish.  Those two have more than 1,200 
catfish ponds between them, along with 
automated plants that process, pack and 
ship their products.
The changing economic times have 
affected even Viking.  Citing the housing 
slowdown, Carl forecasts the company’s 
sales will be down this year from last, snap-
ping a stretch of year-to-year increases of 
10 percent and more.  He foresees a shake-
out in the industry, with Viking winning 
market share from weaker competitors and 
proceeding toward his goal of $1 billion a 
year in sales.  “I always wanted to be large,” 
he says.
The company is forging ahead with new 
products, including its first commercial 
ranges, and new projects, including renova-
tion of downtown Greenwood’s former Elks 
Club into a school for professional chefs.
Downtown’s revival 
Viking’s imprint is already all over that 
38-square-block downtown, which dates 
largely from Greenwood’s boom years of 
the early 20th century.  The company made 
a headquarters out of two square blocks on 
the Yazoo River where traders once bought 
and sold cotton.  The company converted 
other buildings into a cooking school and a 
training center for distributors.  To accom-
modate them and other visitors to town, it 
created the boutique Alluvian Hotel out of 
an old, abandoned hostelry.
Bill Crump, Viking’s director of gov-
ernmental affairs and Carl’s executive 
assistant, says the hotel’s opening five years 
ago marked downtown’s turning point.  
New book, gift, antique and other stores 
followed.  Now—along with historic sights, 
museums and various festivals—downtown 
and the shopping there figure prominently 
in the marketing efforts of the Greenwood 
Convention and Visitors Bureau.
More than 50 downtown buildings have 
been restored since 1995, according to Main 
Street Greenwood, an organization that 
promotes downtown revitalization and is 
responsible for some of it.
Staplcotn has also contributed, spending 
$4.5 million a few years ago to restore its 
headquarters in three adjacent 1950s-era 
buildings.
But Viking has been downtown’s driving 
economic force, just as it has been for the 
city in general.  Crump estimates that 30 
of those 50 buildings downtown have been 
renovated by Viking—or, in a few cases, by 
Carl personally.
Carl’s motivation?  “The quality of life 
in Greenwood is good, but the amenities 
are limited,” making it tough to attract and 
keep managers from out of town, Carl says. 
Most recently, Carl was spearheading an 
effort to remodel and reopen the town’s only 
movie theater, closed since 2002.
Locals tend not to differentiate Carl from 
the company, says Crump.  “To the people 
of Greenwood, Fred is Viking, and Viking 
is Fred.”  And Greenwood has become 
so much both of them that, says Quinn, 
“there’s a risk of taking them for granted ... 
a risk of letting Fred do it.” 
Susan C. Thomson is a freelance writer.  She 
also took all of the photographs, except that of 
Fred Carl. 
“   to the people of Greenwood, 
fred is Viking, and Viking is fred.”
On Howard Street, Greenwood’s main retail street, another old building is being renovated by Viking, this one for a furniture 
store.  Also on Howard Street, visitors will find one of the handful of markers in the area that are part of the Mississippi Blues 
Trail.  Among the famous blues musicians with connections to the area are B.B. King and Robert Johnson.
26   The Regional Economist  |  July 2008

Recipe for success: kitchen company keeps town's economy cooking

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Recipe for success: kitchen company keeps town's economy cooking

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