Phillips Seafood history

Still an operating packing plant, Packing Plant B, located on Hoopers Island in the Chesapeake Bay, opened in 1917 and employed approximately 25 women as crab pickers, along with employees to package crabmeat, soft crab, and oysters.

It was the son of A.E. Phillips, Jr., Brice Phillips, born in 1921, who would begin to build the family business into a multifaceted concern.

She was a 1939 graduate of Hoopers Island High School.

Packing Plant F was family-owned and run until 1956, when the company was sold to Consolidated Foods, now Sara Lee Corporation.

A second dining establishment was opened in 1973, when Phillips-By-The-Sea, also located in Ocean City, debuted.

1977: A third Ocean City restaurant is opened.

Phillips expanded to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor in 1980.

In December 1985 Phillips Flagship, a 1,000-seat restaurant, opened on the Southwest waterfront in the nation's capital.

By 1988 the family business, which now had Steve as president, was generating about $42 million among its six restaurants.

In 1989, Phillips Harborplace grossed $15.8 million, according to an article in Restaurant and Institutions Magazine.

“The Phillipses have made their fortune by working enormously hard and by delicately juggling price and volume,” said the 1990 Sun article.

For the first time, the company could entertain the idea of shipping its seafood products great distances, something it began to do when it entered the retail business in 1996.

Although the Phillips name was well established with restaurant goers in the Maryland–Washington, D.C., area, it meant little to seafood buyers for the wholesale and retail channels. It entered the state's capital, Annapolis, in 1999, opening Phillips Annapolis Harbor along the city's waterfront, offering indoor and outdoor seating for more than 400.

Still the demands were such that in 2000 more plants were opened in India, Mexico, and Ecuador.

During the ensuing five years, the company's revenue volume swelled by nearly 1,000 percent, eclipsing $130 million in 2001.

Reed, Keith T., "King of Crabs," Baltimore Business Journal, January 7, 2002.

The first unit, 3,000 square feet in size and seating 65, opened in a Rockville, Maryland, shopping center in 2003.

2004: Phillips Foods announces plans to open a chain of small foodservice outlets under the name Phillips Famous Seafood.

The goal was eventually to open 500 units across the country, but by early 2005 the plans were put on hold.

Phillips looked northward as well, opening a restaurant in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in October 2006.

A Philadelphia restaurant capable of accommodating 250 people opened in May 2007.

The Halethorpe plant, the company’s first new facility in Maryland since it closed a production plant in Locust Point in 2014, is in the same business park as its sales and marketing offices.

Senator Cardin at the Phillips Packing Plant historic tax credit project, 2017.