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Omaha Steaks® began as a small custom butcher shop in 1917. Since then, the family-owned company has grown into the nation’s largest direct-to-consumer marketer of premium beef and gourmet foods.

In the 1940s, Union Pacific became a customer and purchased the company’s steaks exclusively to be served in the dining cars of their luxury passenger trains.

The company started its first mail-order venture in 1952 with ads in The New Yorker and various fliers and mailings. Mail order sales join online sales and those at Omaha Steaks stores nationwide.

The famous steaks that helped put Omaha top-of-mind are now available in retail storefronts throughout the U.S.

"The customer is at the top of the organizational chart," has been the company’s philosophy for five generations.

A leading administrator of employee benefit programs, PayFlex has been flourishing in Omaha for more than 20 years. PayFlex provides a broad range of services to employers nationwide including many Fortune 500 companies that employ several million people. Services include FSA, HRA, HSA, commuter and dependent care administration, and COBRA and retirement reimbursement.

Since 2005, PayFlex has enjoyed revenue growth of a remarkable 188 percent and has hired more than 150 employees, emerging as a major metro area employer.

PayFlex has been identified as one of the fastest growing, privately held companies in America by Inc. Magazine’s 5000 list.

Film Streams, home to the Ruth Sokolof Theater, is a nonprofit organization dedicated to enhancing the cultural environment of the Greater Omaha area through the presentation and discussion of film as an art form. In 2008, a New York Times article titled “When Omaha Met Cinema” stated, “Both the [Ruth Sokolof Theater] and its extensive offerings are the sort of resources one expects to stumble upon happily in second-city American metropolises–Seattle, Dallas, Philadelphia, even Washington or Chicago.”

This eclectic cinema, located within the Saddle Creek Records development of North Downtown, hosts first-run films, repertory selections and arts in education and community development programs.

Don’t worry if you see an enormous tiger lurking among the swaying jungle leaves on Mutual of Omaha’s headquarters’ tower. It’s just a wrap showing the company’s wilder side, a display based on the world-wide fame of Emmy-winning Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom television program that debuted in 1963. It’s all part of the company’s 100th anniversary celebration.

This isn’t the first interesting visual on the tower. During the summer of 2008, a 10-story tall swimmer graced the building promoting Mutual of Omaha’s Swimvitational, which preceded the U.S. Olympic Team Trials for Swimming.

This group insurer plays a major role in the community with Midtown Crossing at Turner Park mixed-use development and now Mutual of Omaha Bank.

Business is rising like the dough at the James E. Skinner Baking Co., which earlier this year expanded its production capacity 35 percent.

The company’s sales revenues increased 18 percent in 2008, as they sold nearly 16 million pastries in December, up from 13 million one year before. Those figures attracted interest from USA Today’s Money section, writing sales of Skinner baked goods and pastries “are hot, hot, hot” and that the firm is hiring to meet the demand.

Even when people are trimming their grocery budgets, Skinner products remain on their shopping lists. “This is comfort food,” explained Skinner Vice President Audie Keaton in that USA Today article. “Instead of going out to breakfast, I think families are staying home and eating Danish.”

The Portrait of a Creative City

We’re trying to look at creativity as something more than the arts— an essential part of life and culture of the city. Creativity as it applies to social and political problems. - Les Bruning, Omaha artist, educator and visionary.

Nationally-recognized artist Les Bruning has watched the masterpiece evolve over the last few decades. What’s emerged on this canvas is the portrait of a city with a flourishing arts scene.

The daring imagination of grass roots artists led to the creation of bold creative works like the Bemis Center for the Contemporary Arts, Film Streams, KANEKO and Slowdown. Another dynamic piece for the city’s arts collection will join them— the Omaha Creative Institute in North Downtown. Bruning, an art professor at Bellevue University and a founding member of Omaha’s Hot Shops Art Center—a 92,000-square-foot facility that houses 50 art studios as well as showrooms and gallery spaces—is intimately involved with this initiative of the Hot Shops Art Foundation. The institute will also include studios and “creative retail businesses.”

Bruning said it will take several years to take the institute’s grand vision and raise funds to make it a reality. But he’s confident the Foundation’s audacity will yield beautiful returns both culturally and economically.

When finished, internationally renowned artist Jun Kaneko’s gift to the community—KANEKO—will be a 75,000-square-foot “open space for creativity” using three connected historic buildings, a new structure and two garden spaces. A $15 million joint KANEKO-UNO library eventually will include multi-level exhibition spaces, a large studio, sculpture gardens and a research center.

“The creative community encompasses the arts, but it also encompasses what’s going on in the world of business and education and some very interesting corners of Omaha like the University of Nebraska Medical Center and Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo,” said Hal France, KANEKO’s executive director. “We hope to have the full facility done by 2012.”

Decades ago, Ree Kaneko, Jun’s wife, founded another arts institution in Omaha—the Bemis Center for the Contemporary Arts, what Bruning called “one of the main drivers in making Omaha a more cultural place in terms of the visual arts.”