How the ham, roast beef, and yes, the sausage get made: Inside the Philly Dietz & Watson deli meat factory

There are two halves to Philly’s Dietz & Watson plant. On one side, all the meat is already cooked and cooled. Scores of workers ferry slabs of roast beef pork or bundles of hot dogs from speed racks to conveyor belts, so products can get zipped up in plastic and ferried to the warehouse.

This part of the factory, the so-called ready-to-eat side, is frigid — snowpants are fully warranted — but it has a bustling, pleasant atmosphere, fragrant with the smell of London broil and honey-baked ham.

The scene inside the other half — the raw side, as it’s called — is not so appetizing, truth be told.

Before you jump to conclusions: It’s perfectly clean. But as you might expect, there’s a lot of meat. Tons and tons of raw meat resting inside enormous metal vats, glossy with salt, sugar, and spices. Taken individually, these cuts don’t look any different than they would in your home kitchen, sitting on a cutting board waiting to be cooked.

But imagine 2,000 pounds of pork marinating in what’s basically a square swimming pool. Then picture that ton of meat whirling around a stainless-steel cylinder, then being poured out — marinade, meat juices, and all. It’s raining hams. Raw hams.

This is one step in the process of turning the irregularly shaped hind parts of pigs and cows into the uniform, neatly packaged cold cuts you see behind the deli case.

The American meat-processing industry has had more than a century’s worth of bad press. (The Jungle turns 120 this year.) Growing national skepticism of ultra-processed foods — a vaguely defined term describing industrially produced food made with additives, preservatives, and other ingredients — hasn’t helped its reputation in recent years. Nor have the grisly details that leaked after Boar’s Head’s deadly listeria outbreak in 2024.

For all of these reasons, I wasn’t necessarily expecting an open invite from Dietz & Watson, the second-largest deli meat and cheese brand in the country, which sells half a billion dollars’ worth of cold cuts, sausages, and dogs annually — all of which emanate from its Philadelphia headquarters.

To my surprise, Dietz & Watson welcomed The Inquirer in for two hourslong tours, allowing us to see anything and everything in its Tacony Street plant, which produces 100 million pounds of ham, roast beef, sausage, and hot dogs annually. (The company cooks turkey and chicken in Baltimore.) Third-generation owner and CEO Louis Eni Jr., our guide, spouted off facts about innumerable processes, from tenderizing roast beef and stuffing hot dog casings to drying pepperoni and slicing up logs of turkey breast.

Tours are no big deal here: Louis and other employees give an average of two a week to employees and customers. The company has hosted various newspapers, as well as the documentary series How It’s Made.

“We pretty much have an open-door policy,” says Lauren Eni Canseco, Dietz’s VP of brand strategy and Louis’ daughter. To offer something for the public, Dietz published a room-by-room virtual factory tour on its website earlier this year. “We really feel like we have nothing to hide,” Canseco says.

We really feel like we have nothing to hide.”

All of this is in sharp contrast to Boar’s Head, the nation’s biggest deli meat maker — also family-run — where corporate culture is reportedly cutthroat and leadership is so shrouded in secrecy, even a member of its C-suite testified in 2022 that he does not know who the CEO is.

Aside from the fact that Dietz’s own plants have never had a recall in its 86-year history — though a few Dietz-branded products made by co-packers have been recalled — the family’s apparent candor stems from their conviction that there’s nothing wrong with cold cuts.

Louis bristles at the idea that Dietz’s products are “ultra-processed.” (Deli meats, which are often high in sodium, are frequently cited as a prominent example of this genre of food.) He and his siblings — COO Chris Eni and CFO Cindy Eni Yingling — grew up immersed in the industry, as have their kids. Six fourth-generation Enies are currently carrying on the legacy of their sausage-making great-grandfather, Gottlieb Dietz, who came to the U.S. from Germany in 1922. Some of Dietz & Watson’s recipes still trace back to what Ruth “Momma” Dietz Eni — Louis, Chris, and Cindy’s mom — used to make for dinner at home.

So it’s not terribly surprising Louis takes issue with his life’s work getting painted with an unflattering brush. “We’re just cooking,” he maintains. “We’re just marinating, shaping, and cooking.”

As you might imagine, cooking at this volume doesn’t look anything like a home kitchen. The closest it comes is in the spice room, where specialist Vince Guckin assembles the dry ingredients for every item the plant makes. Bags and boxes of seasonings are stacked, parceled out for their respective recipe. Guckin scrawls the name of each product on cardboard marker to label the piles.

Some ingredients you’d find in a grocery store (cane sugar, paprika, rosemary, onion powder, honey, celery seed, and the like). Others are in the domain of industrial and modernist cooks: sodium tripolyphosphate, dextrose, sodium erythorbate, sodium nitrite — additives that function as preservatives, emulsifiers, and accelerants, helping flavor penetrate meat faster. (The company is in the process of replacing some of these ingredients with more natural versions — i.e., cherry powder for sodium erythorbate and celery powder for sodium nitrite.)

Guckin’s spice blends are deployed in enormous batches of roast beef, ham, hot dogs, and sausages. Dietz receives refrigerated truckloads of pork and beef cuts in 2,000-pound “combo bins” — enormous octagonal cardboard boxes — shipped from various meatpacking suppliers. The fresh meat inside has already been broken down and trimmed to Dietz’s specifications, one of the bigger changes that Louis has seen in his time at the company. “Thirty years ago, we would have a line of boners that would [de]bone the ham. Now it’s done at the processing facility,” he says. “It doesn’t make sense for them to ship bones across the country. They want to ship just the meat — and they can [butcher] it much more efficiently.”

The first step for products like ham and roast beef is marination. Dietz has some 50 or so marinades, all with varying salt, sugar, and spice levels. To flavor the many-thousand-pound batches — the Philly plant cooks about 2 million pounds of pork and beef weekly — Dietz uses marinade injectors: two-story-tall units with a mechanical arm that hoists a combo bin of, say, deboned hams into the air, then empties them onto a conveyor. The belt rolls them, carwash-like, through a closed chamber where each “muscle” (as Louis calls them) is pricked all over with marinating needles and shot through with brine. When the hams emerge through the injector tunnel, they drop down into a dumpster-sized vat; each piece of meat looks like it’s taken a turn on a bed of nails.

The injected meat sits until the next day. “We could make a ham now and it would look fine,” Louis says, but “we found that if we let these rest now for 12 to 24 hours, we get better products. That whole process then allows the marinade to find its way to every molecule, and allows that flavor not just to be on the surface.”

Muscles that have marinated overnight are shiny with liquid, and it’s not just marinade. It’s myosin, the salt-soluble protein in meat that’s essential to making meat moldable — so that it can become the cold cut shapes you expect. (Myosin is as much at play in deli meat as it is in pâté or house-made sausage; it’s the meat equivalent of gluten in bread, and the reason you don’t want to overmix your burgers or meatballs.)

Louis points out a combo bin of pork, with each ham weighing 3 to 4 pounds. “How do we get those [individual cuts] all to cook together so that we can slice it real thin?” he asks, explaining that the immersion in a salty brine helps temporarily transform myosin from a solid to liquid.

As salt penetrates the meat during its overnight cure, the myosin is drawn to the surface. That liquefied protein firms up again when cooked. “It’s also the glue that holds those muscles together,” Louis says.

After the overnight cure, the meat is wheeled over to elephant-sized massagers and tumblers that can toss up to 16,000 pounds of meat at a time. Tumblers resemble stationary cement mixers, while massagers look more like the back of an oil truck. They’re filled using either a giant funnel or a vacuum-powered hose so powerful, it sucks up a 2-ton bin of hams in five minutes or less. The machines spin the meat gently, redistributing myosin and marinade, evenly coating each muscle.

The meat is ready to be shaped after being tumbled or massaged. Roast beef is left whole, each muscle vacuum-sealed in plastic for sous-vide-style cooking. Hams, which comprise more than one muscle, require more work: Some are cooked in spring-loaded molds of various shapes (elliptical, square, pear, D-shaped); others are hand-packed into stockinettes, those mesh-like meat socks that give so many deli hams their distinctive bumpy appearance. The nets, which are lined with a thin piece of paper that prevents the twine from cooking into the meat, are not for aesthetics, Louis explains: “You remember, we saw those muscles getting sucked up in the massager — two or three of those muscles make one ham. So something has to hold it in place.”

Hams today are sturdier than they used to be. “When I was a kid,” Louis says, pointing to a ham mold, “what they would do was put a little bit of gelatin and put the muscles in by hand, then press it really hard and hope that it didn’t fall apart when they sliced it. And it usually did fall apart.”

There’s a good reason Louis spends a lot of time unpacking myosin’s role in lunchmeat: It lays the groundwork for understanding what happens in sausage-making.

“When you make a sausage product … instead of being 6-pound pieces of muscle that you’re trying to extract protein from, you want little microscopic-sized pieces,” Louis says. Because the whole muscle gets broken down completely and whipped smooth before being put inside a casing, the myosin can form long chains. “When it’s cooked, [the emulsion] will firm up and give you that snap, that bite that a really good hot dog or sausage has."

Grinding happens in a separate area in the Dietz & Watson plant from where the ham and beef gets prepped, but the ingredients that go into sausages and dogs are very similar, Louis says. “The same exact raw material that McDonald’s buys for hamburgers, we buy for our hot dogs.”

The same exact raw material that McDonald’s buys for hamburgers, we buy for our hot dogs.”

The bulk of the meat for a dog — about 80% — comes from lean, whole-muscle beef chuck and shoulder cuts. (The company makes all-beef dogs as well as beef and pork franks.) Just like the meat for ham and roast beef gets shipped to Dietz & Watson, so, too, does the meat for hot dogs — including some of the trim, sourced from the meat that processors shave off pork chops and steaks. It’s supplemented by whatever trimmings Dietz’s employees shear off its own cuts of beef.

A hot dog’s texture rides on getting the right ratio of lean to fat. All the meat that’s ground up passes through an X-ray machine that screens the product for anything out of place while also precisely measuring its fat content. Dietz grinds up two bases — lean and fat — analyzes them, then mixes them together with salt and spices and reanalyzes them. After that, the meat is blended once more and put in a hopper, where it gets pumped out into casings, either natural (hog, sheep) or artificial (plastic), in sizes ranging from cocktail franks to jumbo dogs. Another machine creates links in the chain in the blink of an eye; artificial casings are mechanically stripped before packaging.

The workers on the two sides of Dietz & Watson’s plant — raw and “ready-to-eat” — are kept apart. They have different lunchrooms, locker rooms, and break times to minimize chances of cross-contamination. (“I think we have a few husband-and-wife pairs that want to be on separate sides,” Louis jokes.) The two halves of the plant are connected by two banks of pass-through ovens and smokehouses with doors on either side: Raw-side employees put meat in, cooked-side workers take it out.

There are myriad ways meat makes its way to the ready-to-eat area. Some items — ham, chicken breast — get baked in their molds or netting. Some, like roast beef or London broil, get slow-cooked so that they’re medium-rare from edge to edge. Other items get smoked (landjaeger sausages, Tiffany ham) or fermented and dried (Genoa salami, pepperoni). Many get a combination of cooking methods.

Products are cooled as quickly as possible after they’re done cooking, and then they’re largely kept that way. This side of the plant is a giant refrigerator. Workers are thoroughly bundled; visitors are provided heavy coats. Most products, once thoroughly cooled, head straight to packaging, but a few get finishing touches, like Virginia Brand ham, which is cold-smoked, then scored and hand-glazed with a warm spice blend (cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, cloves, paprika). The ham makes a third trip to the oven, to melt the spices onto the scored meat.

“We’ve tried to see if there’s a way to automate this, but there’s not,” Louis says. “You can’t coat it like you can by hand.”

This is one of a few of major tasks that are completed by hand on the ready-to-eat side; another is halving slabs of roast beef with a bandsaw, to make them a more manageable size for delis.

All of Dietz & Watson’s in-house slicing is done in Philadelphia, by state-of-the-art industrial slicers that can whittle a several-foot-long log of turkey breast into paper-thin sheets in seconds. The company didn’t always offer this service — it bought the slicers in the early 2000s — but orders for presliced cold cuts have doubled since the pandemic.

Packaging is largely automated, with machines vacuum sealing hunks of meat or slicing it, then immediately enclosing it in a plastic pack.

There are still more robots in Dietz’s distribution center, which is a short walk across the parking lot from the Tacony Street plant. (The distribution center was in Delanco, N.J., from 2007 to 2013, until an 11-alarm fire damaged it so severely, it had to be demolished.) The 200,000-square-foot warehouse, which Philly landed in 2014, is staffed by almost 200 people, as well as three robots. All Dietz product ships from here, driven by either Dietz’s 60-truck fleet or one of its many distributors.

If you worry machines have taken jobs away at Dietz, don’t. Output has more than offset automation, which the company maintains is relatively minimal. Dietz has 1,400 employees across the board, more than 10 times what it had in 1983, when Louis got married.

“It was about 136 when I got married, my wife reminds everybody of that,” Louis says. “We were very small.”

Dietz & Watson started even smaller, of course. Gottlieb Dietz spent years honing his skills as a sausage-maker before teaming up with ham smoker Walter Watson in 1939 to start a meat-wholesaling firm. The two set up a facility at the foot of the still-new Ben Franklin Bridge, at Front and Vine Streets. (They also had a plant in Camden until the late ’60s.) Dietz bought out Watson in the 1940s — Watson stayed on for years, managing sales — then recruited his two daughters, Ruth and Eleanore, to the business. Eleanore, Ruth, and Ruth’s husband, Louis Eni Sr., took over after Gottlieb Dietz’s death in 1964.

In the early ’70s, the federal government prompted Dietz & Watson to clear out of its Philadelphia headquarters to make way for I-95. That led the company to its now longtime home: The family acquired the 100,000-square-foot plant at the intersection of Van Kirk and Tacony Streets in 1975 — around when Dietz’s growth kicked into high gear.

The company expanded distribution beyond Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware for the first time in the ’70s, branching out first to the Northeast and the South. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, the lunchmeat maker gained traction as grocery stores nationwide began installing deli counters to distinguish themselves from pharmacies and retailers that had started selling groceries.

To better supply its growing client roster, Dietz moved its poultry production to a former sausage-making plant in Baltimore in 1999. The company bought a controlling share in upstate New York cheesemaker Yancey’s Fancy in 2004, allowing it to add items like horseradish cheddar and havarti to its lineup.

Dietz had distribution in 48 states by then, and the gradual handoff to the next generation — Louis, Chris, and Cindy — was well underway. When Ruth and her kids sat down for an interview with the Associated Press in 2004, they told the reporter they made decisions together and didn’t put titles on their business cards. Louis said at the time that the company ignored acquisition offers from larger meat processors. “We have too much fun running this business,” he said.

Twenty years later, it’s a point of pride for Louis that his kids and nieces and nephews wanted to work here. “No one’s arms have been twisted,” he says.

The next generation of Enies and Yinglings has helped modernize the company, most noticeably with millennial-era marketing campaigns, such as its Dietz Nuts commercials starring Craig Robinson (of The Office fame) and its 2019 merch-store pop-up on South Street, which specialized in apparel sporting cheesy puns (“body by bacon,” “i <3 wieners”).

Earlier this year, Dietz showed restaurant-industry savvy by partnering with Mawn chef-owner and hot dog enthusiast Phila Lorn on one of its Bird Dogs giveaways in celebration of the Eagles’ playoff run, putting Dietz dogs, wild boar prahok chili, and spicy pickles in a dyed-green Amoroso bun.

Lauren Eni Canseco, Louis’ daughter, has helped spearhead these campaigns. She says she didn’t always know she wanted to land at Dietz when she was younger — “I struggled with, ‘What am I going to do at this meat factory?’” she says — but the business was part of her life in one way or another, whether it was going along with her dad to trade shows or talking about the company at the dinner table.

After college, Canseco worked in advertising elsewhere and got an MBA at Drexel before she came back to the business in 2010. She’s since focused on branding and marketing, engineering ways to inspire enthusiasm for deli meat in young people. It’s worked: Dietz’s e-commerce store is sold out of its hot dog candle, vintage T-shirts, and “weenie beanies.” (You can still get sandwich coasters.)

Canseco says the family culture is key to the company’s gravitational pull. “We actually love each other, we actually like each other, and we actually respect each other,” she says. “We also were raised with the idea that we need to find our place in the business. This is not a free ride. Nobody comes to work and sits, you know, on the internet and gets a paycheck.”

We also were raised with the idea that we need to find our place in the business. This is not a free ride. Nobody comes to work and sits, you know, on the internet and gets a paycheck.”

Louis agrees. “They’re helping make it bigger, to make room for themselves,” he says of the fourth generation. He resists the urge to preemptively recruit his grandchildren. “That’s not up to me, [but] I hope there’s a fifth.”