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

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

Koegel Meat Company was founded in Flint in 1916 by Albert Koegel, a German immigrant who’d learned meat-cutting and worked out his recipes through an apprenticeship back home. He opened a market on Kearsley Street just as Flint’s auto industry — and population — was booming, then built a processing plant in the 1930s, and settled into the Bristol Road factory the company still uses. Generations later, it’s still family-owned, and the recipes haven’t changed since 1916.

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