Ronnie Polaneczky: From deli to dollars, DIetz & Watson is a treasure

A FAMOUS PERSON once said, "The less you know about how laws and sausage are made, the better you'll sleep at night."

Elsewhere in this section, my colleague Dave Davies dissects the scary ways our Harrisburg pols are making laws these days.

Reading his column will give you insomnia.

Me, I'm here to tell you that two days ago, I watched sausage being made at the Dietz & Watson meat-processing plant in Tacony.

And I slept like a baby that night.

Today, D&W will celebrate its 70th birthday with a lunchtime giveaway on Dilworth Plaza. Handing out the free ham, roast beef and buffalo-chicken wraps will be another longtime Philly icon, Jerry Blavat.

I won't be there, as I've already consumed more D&W meat products this week than is healthy for a woman who ought to balance her diet with an occasional fruit cup.

But I'll be glad to croon a psychic "Happy birthday" to the company's heirs, with hopes for many happy returns, because D&W is a rarity in Philly:

A manufacturing company that's actually adding good jobs to the city economy.

Hit it, Louis Eni.

"We're doing great - we've had steady growth," says Eni, president of Dietz & Watson and grandson of company founder Gottlieb Dietz. "Last year, even with the depressed economy, we held our own. We're still processing one-to-two-million pounds of meat every week."

Eni and I are wearing lab coats, hair nets and gigantic rubber galoshes as we slog through D&W's shiny 600,000-square-foot plant at 5701 Tacony St.

The floor is covered by a wet, anti-bacterial foam, and the frigid air smells like everything from a Christmas dinner (clove-y spices are being hand-rubbed on the Virginia hams) to a July 4th barbecue (a wide row of room-size "smokers" are adding tang to thousands of gourmet franks and sausages).

While many of us might be familiar with D&W's 400 mostly deli items, what we don't see are the 550 Philadelphia employees who produce and package them (an additional 450 or so work at other D&W processing or distribution locations out of state).

During its 70-year existence, so many loyal workers have steered their friends and family to jobs at D&W, the place is like a patronage haven, without the politics. Eni says that it's not unusual for new employees to evolve from young hires into gray-headed D&W retirees, decades later.

"There aren't many companies where you can spend your whole career anymore," says Eni later, as we thaw out over coffee in an office conference room. "Companies get bought up, or merged. They get so big, they can't respond to the market anymore. They cut corners to satisfy stockholders, but their quality suffers and they go out of business. We're flexible enough to get new products out quickly. It keeps us successful."

There's no board of directors at family-owned D&W. It's just Eni, his brother Chris, his sister Cindy Eni Yingling and their 84-year-old mom, Ruth Dietz Eni. So, when someone suggests a new product - buffalo-chicken cold cut, anyone? - the kitchen staff creates a recipe, the workforce taste-tests it and, if it passes muster, the Enis add it to the production line.

"At any other company, it could take years to do that," he says. "We can do it in months."

D&W's sales are in the $300 million-plus range, he says, 40 percent of which are generated in the Philly region, where the D&W name is best-known; products are also sold in 40 states and shipped internationally.

"Our own workforce is a big customer base," Eni says. (D&W provides free lunch products to employees every day.) "There's pride in being able to actually touch and hold the product you make. And it's food! There's a difference between making foods and making nuts or bolts. Everybody has to eat."

As I write this, I'm munching on a D&W landjaeger sausage, feeling the same satisfaction I feel when I bite into an apple I've bought from a farmer's own stand. There is unquestionably something wonderful about consuming a product, food or otherwise, that originated in the community where you live.

Philadelphia, once a robust hub of bustling factories, doesn't have many such places anymore. Manufacturing jobs in the city plunged 38 percent between 2000 and 2008, according to a recent Pew report. And research from Select Greater Philadelphia shows that fewer people are needed to produce the stuff we do manufacture.

So, it's delightful that D&W has hit its septuagenarian years in such good health (maybe 70 really is the new 50?), providing steady jobs with decent wages and benefits so that workers do something retro: start and finish their careers in one place.

Happy birthday, Eni family.

Pass the landjaeger.

E-mail polaner@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2217. For recent columns:

http://go.philly.com/polaneczky. Read Ronnie's blog at http://go.philly.com/ ronnieblog.