A quest to find a use for whey produced as a byproduct of organic cheese making drove Tera Johnson to create Wisconsin Specialty Protein, maker of Tera’s Whey nutritional protein powder, which sold in 2012 to Omega Protein for $26.5 million. Now Tera is running the Madison-based Food Finance Institute , a project of the University of Wisconsin – Extension that supports professionals who are growing profitable food, beverage and value-added agriculture businesses. She also hosts the popular

After getting his PhD in food microbiology from Iowa State, Tom Rehberger took a research-oriented faculty position in Oklahoma State’s animal science department. There he met critical collaborators with whom he discovered that introducing certain friendly bacteria into cows’ stomachs kept them from getting a potentially fatal form of nitrate toxicity, known as chocolate blood syndrome. That discovery set Tom on a commercial path and gave him Milwaukee connections because Phar-More Biochemical,

Jerry Smith's entrepreneurial streak helped shape a successful 45-year career in commercial banking. He was founding CEO of First Business Bank and its parent company. Jerry is now chairman of First Business Financial Services, a publicly traded company with a $200 million market cap and $1.8 billion in assets. 1. Trust your instincts and don’t quit Despite the fact that he would be paralyzed for 36 years, Jerry’s dad never gave up hope that he would one day walk again. In his father’s prayer

Today Lake Effect debuts a new monthly series: How Did You Do That? Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and executive director of the Milwaukee Institute Kathleen Gallagher and Tim Keane, director of Golden Angels Investors and an entrepreneur who led his own startup to a profitable acquisition, talk with successful entrepreneurs about how – and why – they succeeded. When Retail Target Marketing Systems Inc. failed to mail catalogs to some of Boston Store's key customers a week before a big sale,