CMP

Compass Minerals International, Inc.

One of the world's largest producers of salt, Compass Minerals digs rock salt from mines in North America and the U.K. that is spread on icy highways, put on dinner tables, and used in water softeners; it also makes magnesium chloride for deicing and sulfate of potash for crop fertilizer. The company traces its roots to 1844, but its modern form took shape in 1988 when a firm began buying up salt businesses that big corporations had cast aside. The "Compass" name honors the tool early miners used to navigate underground, and the company runs a records-storage service in a retired English salt mine where documents are kept in naturally stable, vermin-free caverns.