BALANCE OF TRADE SURPLUSES. I wonder how they taste with kimchi and Chinese mustard?

Getting consumers to taste the product has been a key to Johnsonville Sausage's marketing strategy for years. Now the Wisconsin-based sausage maker is taking the effort to a new level, with Orya, a chain of bratwurst restaurants in Shanghai.

China is an interesting place to try to sell brats, said Bill Morgan, Johnsonville's president.

They're starting small.

The Chinese bratwurst restaurant is the latest effort in an international strategy that Johnsonville embarked upon during the 1990s. International sales are a small but fast-growing part of Johnsonville's business, totaling $35 million last year, when the company had sales of about $700 million.

Thanks in part to the growth of the international business, Johnsonville has nearly doubled its work force in the past five years, to 1,400 now, up from 750. The company, which is still owned by the family of founder Ralph Stayer, refers to employees as "members."

But the company itself started small.

Chief Executive Officer Ralph C. Stayer, son of the founder, first decided in the early 1990s to pursue sales outside the United States as a way to keep growing after Johnsonville achieved distribution across the country. By 2003, international sales had increased to the point that the company had to build an additional plant at its headquarters campus in Sheboygan Falls.

The headquarters is located just south of the site of the original Johnsonville butcher shop, in the unincorporated community that was its namesake. Stayer's parents, Ralph F. and Alice Stayer, started the business in 1945.

At one time, that butcher shop and some Red Owl stores in Plymouth and Sheboygan were the only retail outlets. How things change.

In the U.S., Johnsonville dominates the market in sales in some categories, including bratwurst, smoked cooked link sausage and breakfast link sausage. Johnsonville's biggest competitors in the U.S. in most categories are small regional or local companies such as Klement's and Usingers in Milwaukee, Morgan said.

Usingers bratwursts are pretty good, although the more recent national grand champion from Ream's in Elburn are better. (The store even stocks proper mustard, no mean feat south of the Cheddar Curtain where that thin yellow gruel from French's is supposedly a gastronomic experience.)

Not surprisingly, bratwurst season coincides with air show season, or baseball season.

Together, all of the Johnsonville plants are capable of turning out 1 million pounds of sausage per day. From Easter to October, the company cranks up production to peak levels, because it's the season when [ad character] Charlie [Murphy], and his counterparts all over the world, grill a lot of Johnsonville brats.

Here's more on Orya. Freedom Eden quips, "I like the thought of a product being sold in China with a "made in America" label." The chopstick factory near Duluth and the ginseng fields in Indianhead country and the soy sauce works in Walworth also come to mind. U.S. higher education also exports a lot of Ph.D.s to China.