Big bowl business.

• Author: Woodring, Jeannie
• Position: The Great Alaskan Bowl Co.

This crafty Fairbanks firm is one of two companies in the country that makes multiple birch bowls out of a single piece of wood -- and finds uses for every bit of birch.

Thirty thousand visitors a year can't be wrong. In a shop off Airport Road in Fairbanks, The Great Alaska Bowl Co. is spinning out innovative birch bowls and birch by-products that are capturing the attention of customers worldwide.

Drop by the shop to see its wares or catch a tour, and you'll discover the source of the excitement. There's really no company like this in Alaska, and only one other similar to it in New England.

Your tour begins in the parking lot next to the building, where visitors clamor over piles of hollowed-out birch blocks.

"What are these used for?" an older man asks, reaching down to touch a rough-hewn block.

"Planters," answers a teen-ager. "That's what's left after they carve the bowls from a piece of wood. Step inside and you can watch them do it."

The front shop of The Great Alaska Bowl Co. smells like a rich lumber mill. Shelves contain hundreds of gleaming birch bowls, in multiple sets, in small and large sizes, each unique in its grainy wood pattern. Other shelves and walls of the shop contain products left over from the wood-cutting process: odd-sized bowls and planks used for cutting boards, bird feeders, stands, and wall planters; wood shavings for tree ornaments, compost piles or a covering on slippery winter sidewalks.

"Nothing is wasted in the entire bowl-making process," says Marti Steury, company president. "Even the sawdust leftover from the sanding process goes to an artist, who uses it for his sculptures."

"It takes 22 individual steps to make these bowls," she adds.

Through a glass window in the shop, you can watch workers whiz out bowls on a unique cutting machine. The idea for the machine came from Vermont, where two of the company's founders traveled a few years ago and learned about birch bowls.

Decades ago, birch bowls graced the homes of early America, including Alaska. In fact, entire birch forests vanished as the country's first entrepreneurs crafted the trees into birch bowls and furniture.

Today, the only other birch bowl-making company is in Granville, Vt. There, the Fairbanks' travelers found the man who owned the Granville bowl mill for 50 years and still had the blueprints for a cutting machine that dates back to 1855 and cuts multiple bowls from a single piece of wood in minutes.

To build their own machine, the...