Beginning in a small, wooden workshop on Fayard Street in Biloxi, Philip Dellenger, Sr. establish his sheet metal business in 1949. Originally working mostly with roofing and other minor sheet metal work, Dellenger found himself strategically located in the heart of a booming seafood industry, which brought new opportunities with the processing plants. He began manufacturing shrimp de-heading tables, oyster tables, conveyor belts, de-ice tanks and water troughs. This manufacturing, along with the Laitram Corporation’s concurrent introduction of the automatic shrimp peeling machine, was the first step in alleviating some of the “back breaking”, labor intensive tasks in seafood processing.
Dellenger’s two sons, Philip Jr., and Keith, and son-in-law, Marc Sramek, joined the company in the 1970’s and continued the trajectory of the business and its cooperation with the seafood industry. In the 1980’s, the Philip Dellenger Sheet Metal team was the first to develop a semi-automatic packing machine. At that time, this was a “game changer” for the industry. This configuration consisted of a conveyor belt feeding into a scale hopper; once the scale reached a preset weight, the belt would stop, the scale hopper door would open releasing the product into a bag while injecting water simultaneously. This was just one example of innovations and designs contributed by the company. Even the Laitram company, with its vast resources and worldwide impact has contracted with Dellenger to develop, design, and build new equipment.
Many industries and institutions have benefitted from the services of Dellenger’s Sheet Metal, including casinos, restaurants, poultry processing plants, recycling plants and even the Tabasco Corporation.
Now, after 70 years, with some minor additions, the company continues to do business every day in the same small, wooden workshop on Fayard St. With the addition of Jamie and Phillip III, the Dellenger Sheet Metal Company is poised to continue working with the seafood industry that is the pride of the Mississippi Gulf Coast.