Koegel's Viennas: The Snap Heard 'Round the Mitten

There’s a sound a lot of Michiganders tie to summer. It’s the little snap when you bite into a Koegel’s Vienna. For more than a century, this Flint company has made the hot dogs that a whole swath of the state grew up grilling.

Albert Koegel founded Koegel Meat Company in Flint in 1916. He was a German immigrant who had learned meat-cutting as an apprentice back home, working out his recipes along the way. He opened a market on Kearsley Street just as Flint’s auto industry — and its population — boomed. He built a processing plant in the 1930s. Then the company settled into the Bristol Road factory it still uses. Generations later, it’s still family-owned. The recipes haven’t changed since 1916.

The star is the Vienna frankfurter, prized for that natural-casing snap. It’s the same crunch that defines a proper Flint- or Detroit-style coney. The company’s old motto sums it up: “made up to a quality, not down to a price.” Koegel’s are mostly a Michigan thing. That’s exactly why Michiganders who moved away have been known to pack a cooler of them home.