Photographs by Shane Van Boxtel, Image Studios
Amid the latest buzz about automation in manufacturing, one Northeast Wisconsin company has been quietly perfecting it for nearly five decades. There’s a good reason your store-bought sandwich cookies are hardly ever cracked and your frozen pastry comes out of the oven with a perfect, flaky texture: the precisely engineered conveyor systems made in Oconto, Wisconsin.
Mike Weickert, president of Nercon, describes his craft like “a giant erector set for adults.” The mix of electrical, mechanical and mathematics challenges his team navigates on every custom project keeps a lot more than just bottles of shampoo or slices of cheese moving.
Committed to the craft
With multiple projects underway simultaneously, changing over as frequently as every two weeks, Nercon’s employees are not likely to experience a dull moment working for the manufacturer, which is a leading producer of conveyor systems, primarily for manufacturers in the food, beverage and household products industries. The company was founded by James Nerenhausen — the “Ner” to go with the “Con” that denotes conveyor systems in the business’ name — in Oshkosh in 1976, but since 2014 it has operated out of Neenah, which is home to its engineering center, and Oconto, which is home to its manufacturing operations.
Nerenhausen died in 2017, but on the heels of its 50th anniversary the company remains owned by the Nerenhausen family under the leadership of James’ son, Jay, and of Weickert as president. A full half of the company’s employees boast tenures of more than a decade, and more than a quarter have worked for Nercon more than 20 years.
Research and Development Director Jeff Falash’s number is 37.
“I was like, ‘I’ll go there and get some experience and see where it takes me from there,’” recalls Falash, who joined the Nercon team right out of high school. “But the opportunities here have always been good for me, you know, and I’ve been able to move around and do different things. It just worked out that I had no reason to go.”
Falash was promoted to his current R&D role, which he describes as a “dream job,” 10 years ago. And while Nercon offers tuition reimbursement benefits, Falash never attended college. With Nercon’s support he attended classes and learned everything else he needed to know through on-site training and a diverse work experience. He says the company’s commitment and reinvestment are big drivers behind Nercon’s impressive employee longevity.
“The company is always putting money back in. There’s new equipment on the floor, new additions,” Falash says. “You could always see it was going places.”
Weickert, an electrical engineer by training, has been with Nercon for 31 years, working his way up from the electrical team and often reluctantly taking on advancement opportunities as they were offered to him. Even after seven years in the role, Weickert’s LinkedIn profile doesn’t indicate his correct title.
“I’m not looking for notoriety and there wasn’t a goal [to be president],” Weickert says. “I wanted to help produce the best product we could for the customer. But it’s like so many things: Now that I am [president], I wouldn’t want to go back. I really enjoy seeing more aspects of the company as I’ve grown up through it, and it’s really nice to see our departments and teams work together.”
A spirit of collaboration and checking egos at the door has been a hallmark of Nercon’s current leadership. Weickert, who often sweeps the plant floor himself before customers visit, says it is important to him and the leadership team for employees to know that the best ideas don’t necessarily come from the top of the org chart.
“[Employees] can go a long way here. You’re going to see different things, and we don’t want [anyone to say] ‘They don’t listen to my ideas, so I won’t come up with any more ideas.’ We want people to come up with ideas and not be afraid to share them,” Falash says. “We try to go out on the floor and mingle with people, work on issues, and just listen.”
Building better
Walk the aisles of your neighborhood grocery store and you’ll get a pretty comprehensive tour of Nercon’s customer base, which includes industry giants like Nestlé, Kellogg’s and Mars. The company’s shop floor and R&D office are piled with boxes of candy bars, toaster pastries and other not-always-so-fresh food samples that get put through their paces as custom conveyor systems are developed.
“I almost guarantee you have stuff in your house that’s taken a ride on our systems,” Weickert says.
And while the idea of food on conveyor belts may bring to mind visions of Lucy and Ethel stuffing candy down their blouses in the chocolate factory, Nercon’s conveyor systems are built to maximize time and handle any plot twist on the factory floor.
“It’s not just moving from point A to point B,” Weickert says. “There’s a lot that goes in the middle of it.”
Nercon’s custom conveyors are designed to fit properly into an existing factory design, taking twists, turns, and angles that maximize a given factory’s space and workforce. Darrick Prill, Nercon’s engineering manager, says there are nuances to consider on every project, including the materials from which products are made, inclines and declines relative to product weight, and temperatures in the environment.
“Is there dust that can be on a conveyor where you now can only go up to 12 degrees instead of 15 degrees? The variables that you need to think about, there’s quite a few,” Prill says.
And not only are Nercon conveyors transporting and packaging food, they’re even integral to the food production process itself. One of Weickert’s proudest career achievements, he says, has been Nercon’s role in innovating the iconic microwavable savory turnover, the Hot Pocket.
Nercon was challenged with creating a solution that pulls and laminates Hot Pockets’ five layers of dough, among other production tasks. “When we did those first lines, we made 10,000 pounds of dough here,” Weickert says.
Another signature innovation that has been a feather in Nercon’s cap is the wash-down spiral, which has proven to be a critical innovation for food and beverage producers. Weickert was inspired to create the wash-down spiral after connecting with Nercon vendor partner Intralox at an industry trade show. Nercon had been making spiral conveyors for years, but they weren’t suitable for a wash-down environment. Today the product, which uses the food-safe Intralox conveyor chain, is integral to production of a popular brand of kids’ sandwiches, pet foods, pies and many national food and beverage brands. It is now offered as a standard product through Nercon’s Modular Conveyor Express (MCE) division, which was created in 2014 to distribute pre-engineered conveyance solutions.
Casey Ownby of Ownby Industrial, a food and beverage consultant, works almost exclusively with MCE on the wash-down stainless steel conveyance systems, including the spiral, that are critical in brewing, distilling and dairy applications.
“The filling and packaging run is basically the lifeblood of any food process facility. You can make as much product as you want, but if you can’t get that product packaged and out the door it doesn’t really matter,” Ownby says.
Ownby says Nercon’s products are superior because of customer service, price, engineering and material quality, and he says it is not to be understated that Wisconsin-made products result in quicker lead times than industry competitors he has encountered.
“If your conveyors are going down constantly or you have to wait for parts, you’re going to be in trouble. You’re going to lose valuable production time, so working with MCE and Nercon you’re going to experience more up time,” Ownby says. “They’ve been a breeze to work with.”
“We’ve had nice growth over the last three, four years, and we’re producing the best product we’ve ever produced, most efficiently for our customers,” says Weickert, who describes his leadership philosophy simply as “make it happen.” “We’ve been able to reduce lead times for our clients, and a lot of that’s been through the investment of our owners into the technologies we use.”
Keeping things moving
The amount of time a Nercon employee spends thinking about, or even dreaming about, conveyor systems is hard to quantify. Weickert admits he sometimes has to bite his tongue when volunteering at his church’s food pantry, where his brain can’t turn off thoughts about the efficient movement of canned goods. But that passion, attention to detail and understanding the product from every angle is exactly why Weickert and the Nercon team are so successful, says Fabrication Manager Jim Eckes.
“[Mike] surprises me nearly every week on how much he really knows about our product,” Eckes says. “He’ll come up to me and say, ‘Hey, I’ve been thinking about this,’ and in my head I’m like, ‘Don’t you have more important things to think about than that fastener on that thing?’”
With multiple employees poised to celebrate their 40th anniversaries, Weickert knows that capturing and transferring the deep knowledge possessed by so many is critical for the company’s future.
“In my heart, I come from a teaching perspective,” he says. “If somebody is in a particular role for a couple of years, we talk to them openly about other areas in the company that would be interesting. People are really smart, and they can learn things quickly.”
“[Mike] has an extreme willingness to … move people around so they’re not going to get stale on that little project they’re working on,” Eckes says. “Sometimes maybe we need to push boundaries a little bit and get ourselves moving more.”
Like all manufacturers in the New North region, Nercon is focused on recruiting new talent through membership in the NEW Manufacturing Alliance, marketing initiatives and community partnerships — including just the simple act of offering tours of the facility that Eckes says is even still a mystery to some in Oconto. The partnership of which Eckes is most proud, however, is Nercon’s burgeoning youth apprenticeship program through the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development.
Eckes says the experience Nercon has been able to provide to youth apprentices from Lena High School, Oconto Falls High School and Oconto High School, which is located a mere two blocks away from Nercon’s manufacturing facility, has been diverse and effective.
“It’s not a factory line assembly position where you’re just doing piecework, that kind of thing,” Eckes says. “So if you’re that person that wants to move around a lot, this is the place to be, for sure.”
Shawn Porath, the metals instructor at Oconto High who completed a teacher externship at Nercon, says his students have never had a single complaint about their youth apprenticeship experiences at Nercon.
“They don’t rely on these kids as just workers where they need somebody to fill a spot,” Porath says. “They truly, I believe, think of this as a teaching thing, and it’s something they want to provide for the community, as well as hopefully find the future workers they need. The wealth of knowledge they can share with our students is, you can’t put a price on it.”
One thing Porath is able to attempt to put a price on is the donations Nercon has made to the school, including scrap metal that numbers in the tens of thousands of dollars annually, as well as a brand-new press brake and other equipment. Nercon also helped establish the Excellence in Technical Education Scholarship at Oconto High and named it in honor of the late Aubrey Williams, a former youth apprentice who died tragically in a 2023 motorcycle accident.
Nercon’s community investment has not gone unnoticed at Oconto High.
“There’s no way as a high school we could afford the equipment, afford all the metal and everything we need to be successful here,” Porath says. “I don’t have to charge kids anything for their projects, which for a poorer school district is tremendous.”
Weickert’s eyes get misty when he reflects on his employees’ commitment to their customers and community.
“I’m proud of the team we have here,” he says. “A lot of people do a lot of good things to make us successful.”
