On the factory floor of the Dietz & Watson plant
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
“Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.” This quote from American poet John Godfrey Saxe is commonly misattributed to Otto von Bismarck. The Prussian statesman echoed the sentiment years later, saying, “Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.”
No matter on which side of the pond this quote originated, when you’re approaching the entrance to the Dietz & Watson deli-meats factory just off Tacony Street in Northeast Philly, there’s a moment of pause when these two quotes ring very true.
If you’re familiar with Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma or Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, food politics or the concept of pink slime, the idea of setting foot in a meat-processing plant isn’t exactly comfortable.
But in the conference room at Dietz & Watson, the small marketing team assures me that they had all toured the factory recently, and it was an eye-opening experience in a totally different way. They explain that the company supplies lunch to all of its employees every day: cold cuts and condiments with a BYOB policy (that would be bring your own bread) and that no one had skipped lunch after seeing how the proverbial (and not-so-proverbial) sausage was made.
But before suiting up and heading into the plant — a task that requires a shin-length, powder-blue lab coat, a pair of black rubber waders, a hairnet, a pink plastic helmet and an in-ear microphone — let’s back up a little. Seventy-five years to be exact.
Gottlieb Dietz emigrated from Stuttgart, Germany, in 1939. Trained as a wursthersteller, or sausage maker, he brought his pork know-how with him to Philadelphia.
“He came over and worked in the sausage-making business here in Philadelphia, but he always wanted to start his own business,” says Louis Eni, Gottlieb’s grandson and CEO of Dietz & Watson. A few years later, the trained butcher and sausage maker crossed paths with a mysterious Mr. Watson, a ham smoker with whom Dietz began his delicatessen empire. Watson parted ways with Dietz shortly after the company was founded, but his name remains.
The early days of Dietz & Watson were based on batter, basically a finely emulsified blend of pork and beef that could be piped into casings for hot dogs and wieners and molded into bologna and loaves. Loaves? Well, loaves of pimento-and-olive-studded luncheon meat might not be deli bestsellers these days, but at the time they were everyday lunch.
“It’s interesting to see how the business has changed. That was the deli business. If we made a handful of hams, that was a big week. Nobody went to a little neighborhood deli and bought ham or turkey. No one had even heard of turkey breast in those days,” Eni says.
The company operated out of a now-gone building at Front and Vine streets until 1975 when I-95 was built and the company was forced to relocate to its Tacony Street digs. Marketing manager Kevin Rider Jr. says the the operations at the Philadelphia plant (there are two other locations, one in upstate New York and the other in Baltimore, which specialize in cheese and poultry, respectively) are based on a European model.
“It’s very European-style production. In Europe, they don’t have a lot of room so they go north and south. Machines can be moved in and out [of the production space] depending upon whether or not they’re using them,” Rider says. “When you go into the plant, you’ll see big tubs, but they’re only 500 pounds. This isn’t an Oscar Meyer or a Tastykake with a mile and a half of factory-floor space.”
On the floor, John Capra (a man who bears a striking resemblance to Tom Colicchio of Top Chef fame), Dietz & Watson’s quality assurance manager, served as a guide through the facility. We began just around noon when most of the company’s employees were heading to lunch. Capra greeted many of them by name, explaining that part of his job was to show around new hires, some of whom come from places like Hong Kong and Honduras, and many employees who have been with the company for decades.
The floor of the factory is covered in a thick, white foam that looks like what happens when you add a little too much detergent to your washing machine. Capra explains that it’s antimicrobial foam that’s constantly pumped in to assure sanitary conditions (and the reason that we’re all outfitted with those black rubber waders.) Capra has also set up the day’s tour backward, going from cooked product to raw, a precaution to eliminate any possible cross-contamination.
We walk through brisk brining rooms, smoking rooms, drying rooms for fermenting pepperoni — all of the finishing steps of Dietz & Watson’s meats. The larger pepperoni logs sit in the drying room for up to three weeks while the snack size are ready to go in just 48 hours.
And then there’s the spice room. While it’s not exactly the colorful scene of a spice market in Delhi or Istanbul, Dietz & Watson’s spice room must be home to the largest volume of spices in the city. And the air — thickly scented with mace, paprika and garlic powder — is misty with a palpable savoriness.
Moving into the raw-production area, Eni joins the tour. We stop to look at massive cardboard crates filled with the subdivisions of primal cuts of pork and beef from farms in the Midwest. That notion of hot dogs being made of lesser cuts (the old pig’s-lips-and-assholes formula) couldn’t be further from the case here. There’s no denying that this is factory-farmed meat, but the cuts here are pristine and well-marbled, the kind of meat that looks infinitely more appealing than what you’ll find in most supermarkets.
Next up was Dietz & Watson’s micro lab. A hot-dog roller might not be the first piece of equipment you’d think you’d find in a lab, but there it was — set up and loaded with sausages and hot dogs — alongside all of the beakers and vials. “We do our research and development in here. We do a lot of cooking in here, a lot of product tasting,” says Eni. “And a lot of eating,” chimes in scientist Bob Seaver. “Every day at lunchtime, we slice product,” Capra explains. “We have product on the grill all of the time that we’re tasting, making sure it’s right. We pull product on the line throughout the day to taste it. What they packed last night on second shift, I’ll pull it in the morning when I come in and put it on the grill and try it.”
After walking through room after room of hot dogs being filled, cased and peeled (mid-April is the beginning of hot-dog season at Dietz & Watson), the tour ends back in the conference room with two generations of the Dietz family, including the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Gottlieb Dietz.
Cindy Yingling, CFO, shares a bittersweet story about how her father had a heart attack on the day of her college graduation, sparking the introduction of the company’s first low-sodium ham, back in 1979.
When asked about how being a Philadelphia-based company affects their business, Eni replies, “I don’t know, we’ve always been in Philly.”
He goes on to talk about scrapple, the ubiquitous, love-it-or-hate-it breakfast meat. Lauren Eni, head of brand marketing, says this Philadelphia-centric product has a die-hard fan base outside of the city, too, in places like Southern California, Phoenix, Arizona and Southern Florida. “We do a little mail order, and if someone wants it bad enough, we get it to them,” she says.
“One thing that’s unique about Philly, that can’t be said for many other cities that I’m aware of, is that Philly is very much a sandwich town,” says Chris Yingling, a third-generation member of the Dietz clan and vice president of finance for the company.
“In Chicago, you have that dipped [Italian] beef sandwich and in Southern California you’ve got sandwiches loaded with bean sprouts and avocaado slices. There are so many regional sandwiches, but Philly is ‘the sandwich [town]’. You have tons of bread companies. There’s a huge focus on the sandwich itself and however that may materialize. That being said, what better place for a deli company to thrive and incubate than Philadelphia?”
