About the Dupps Co.
Founded: 1935, by John J. Dupps Jr. Current president, Frank N. Dupps Jr., is his great-grandson.
Annual revenues: About $70 million in 2009. The privately owned company does not publicly disclose its profits.
GERMANTOWN — When Frank Dupps Jr. began working for his family’s Dupps Co. in 1991, sales to international customers accounted for 5 percent of revenues. Now it is 50 percent, he said.
Frank Dupps Jr. helped build that overseas business as the company’s director of international sales. On July 1, he became president of the company that started 75 years ago in Cincinnati, then a meatpacking center, to support operators of rendering businesses that specialized in recycling animal fats for other uses including soap and candles.
“Sometimes, it feels a little overwhelming,” Dupps, who logged countless miles for years seeking new business abroad, said of his new job. “You’re in business for 75 years, and now it’s all in your lap.”
The company still provides processing systems and plant installations for customers in the animal rendering industry, but regards it as a “mature but declining” business in the United States, Dupps said in an interview last week. The company is serving customers in new markets, including designing and furnishing systems that separate seeds from soybean oils or process fish meal, and is seeking new customers in medical fields, he said.
In the meantime, rendering customers in Colombia, Mexico and Russia keep the orders coming, including an $8 million order from Colombia that will keep Dupps employees busy for almost a year, the new president said.
Sales or manufacturing partners in Japan, Australia, Netherlands, Turkey, Brazil and Peru supplement the company’s 141 employees at its home in Germantown, where it officially relocated from Cincinnati in 1948 after years of operating the Germantown site.
Last week, Australian business partners visited Germantown to discuss how to counter competition from Thailand, Dupps said.
The Germantown site includes systems design and manufacturing, metal fabricating and parts supply.
Cranes load processing systems that can weigh up to 200 tons onto rail cars and trucks for shipment to customers.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2242 or jnolan@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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