Your business week, 8/30 – 9/5
The Wahlburgers are on their way: Hy-Vee will be adding Mark Wahlberg and brothers’ burger chain to its Midwest stores.
- The first will be in Des Moines (Hy-Vee is based in Iowa).
- At least one will be opening in the Twin Cities (location not yet determined) by 2018.
- The Boston-based chain will also have products incorporated into the menus at Hy-Vee’s existing Market Grille restaurants.
Minneapolis
Amazon’s cloud will no longer rain on Target: Target is looking elsewhere for cloud services.
- Microsoft’s Azure is hoping to lure Target, but the retail giant has hinted at bringing digital services in-house using Spinnaker, the open-source system that was originally developed by Netflix.
- Seattle-based Amazon controls about 1/3 of the cloud infrastructure market.
St. Paul
St. Paul’s Market House Collective announces partnerships:
- Salty Tart’s Michelle Gayer will be opening a second location of the beloved bakery.
- Peterson Limousin Beef (a company we know and love, read on: A better cut: Peterson Limousin Beef) will be taking over the butcher shop section.
- Tim McKee’s Octo Fishbar will be the promised restaurant portion (Octo = it is his 8th restaurant, and because they’ll ostensibly be serving octopus), alongside his Fish Guys-based fish market.
7th Street Truck Park now open.
- Read our coverage here: 7th Street Truck Park: St. Paul’s newest “restaurant”
Metro
2017 Minnesota State Fair breaks attendance records.
- 1,977,320 people attended in 2017, beating last year’s record of 1,943,719.
Maplewood’s Maple Ridge Shopping Center sold to Slate Retail Real Estate Investment Trust (mouthful) for $13.4 million.
- The shopping center includes one of the Twin Cities’ very last Rainbow Foods grocery stores.
The Medtronic + Mazor love story continues:
- Medtronic investing another $40 million into the Israeli robotics company, bringing the total to $72 million.
- The two companies will also work together to develop new products going forward.
- Mazor develops 3D images for surgeons, and electronics like robotic arms and implantable devices used during surgery.
Best Buy expanding same-day delivery to (what else?) keep up with Amazon.
- The cities to benefit are as follows (in alphabetical order!): Austin, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Columbus, Denver, Kansas City, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Orlando, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Sacramento, San Antonio, San Diego and Tampa.
