Delta Pacific expands to meet medical demand

Delta Pacific Products is expanding into a second facility in California to meet increased demand from medical device customers in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Start-up businesses with an infusion of cash — as well as established businesses turning to Delta for the first time — are behind the Union City, Calif.-based company's decision to expand operations into a rented facility about 15 minutes away in Fremont, according to Edward van der Krol, Delta's director of business development.

"The majority of our business is medical devices and life sciences, and being in the Bay Area, a lot of our customers are startups, and that keeps growing," van der Krol said in a phone interview. "There seems to be a lot of money available to start a business and after a year or so some are acquired by large medical device companies. But really, the growth has been from a lot of new customers that are smaller, and mid-size companies."

Founded in 1988, Delta offers mold making and injection molding at a 33,000-square-foot facility in Union City and now a 20,000-square-foot plant in Fremont. In addition to producing and maintaining molds in house, the company has an affiliate in Taiwan called Delta Asia International, which it says gives customers the option to build tools at competitive prices with short lead times.

In Union City, Delta has about 150 employees producing complex parts for biotech, pharmaceutical and high-tech applications in addition to medical devices and life sciences. Capabilities include overmolding, vertical-insert molding and processing a variety of plastics that require specific handling, such as bioabsorbable polymers, implantable grades of polyurethanes and engineering thermoplastics.

"We're seeing a lot of cutting edge products passing by and that makes our work interesting," van der Krol said.

Delta has 30 injection molding presses that range from 22 to 240 tons of clamping force and can produce small-volume parts for startups to high-volume parts for established product lines as well as a clean room.

At its Fremont site, Delta invested about $1.5 million into new equipment, including three presses. The facility began operations the week of March 12 with four new hires. Tooling, machinery and employees will be added as the facility is built out for new customers, van der Krol said.

"This isn't the cheapest part of the country to locate, but it really helps us to be by the engineers of our customers. They like to come by our facility to review the parts and see them run," he said. "When we work with the startups, there's very close collaboration and being close physically helps that as well."

Delta Pacific also offers device assembly and packaging.