Urethane cement and epoxy systems for Burlington food plants, breweries, bakeries, dairies, meat and produce processors and commercial kitchens. Seamless, coved to the wall, sloped to drain and built to survive daily hot washdown.
Free on-site assessment, usually within days because we are based here in Burlington. Written scope, fixed price, no obligation.
Nobody budgets for a floor until it turns into an audit finding or an unplanned shutdown. By then it is the most expensive line item in the building, and it is on somebody else's timetable rather than yours.
A cracked slab, an open wall junction or a drain throat that has been eaten out reads as a finding. Remediating under a corrective action deadline costs a multiple of doing the same work on your own schedule.
Standard epoxy specified into a hot washdown area is a recurring operating cost pretending to be a capital project. Three recoats cost more than one urethane cement system that was right the first time.
Once a coating debonds at a drain or a wall junction, washdown drives water underneath it. You cannot clean what you cannot reach, and the failure spreads sideways from that point on.
A cook line floor polished smooth by years of scrubbing is a claim waiting to happen, and the lost time is the smallest part of that bill.
With four hundred plus food and beverage businesses in Burlington, we see this failure more here than anywhere else, and it is almost always the same two places: the drain throat and the wall junction. The middle of the floor is usually fine, which is good news for what it costs to fix.
One unplanned shutdown almost always costs more than the floor would have.
Invest Burlington counts over 400 food and beverage businesses employing more than 7,800 people, with Sofina Foods and Voortman Cookies both in the city's top five private employers and Cargill Canada, Pinty's, Earth Fresh Foods and the Chicken Farmers of Ontario head office all here as well. That concentration is why more of our washdown and urethane cement work lands in Burlington than anywhere else. It also means the buildings run the full range, from 1960s Harvester Road stock with hard-troweled slabs and no vapour retarder, to newer plants on the 407 Corridor where green concrete is the constraint instead.
Most requested in Burlington: urethane cement in wet process and bottling areas.
Harvester Road and the North Service Road stock dates to the 1960s through 1980s, which usually means a hard-troweled slab with no vapour retarder under it and decades of soaked-in product. The 407 Corridor and Bronte Creek Meadows are Burlington's newest inventory, where green concrete and slab moisture are the risk instead.
Because we are based in Burlington, most of our food and beverage work here starts with a same-week walk-through, and that matters more than it sounds. The single most useful hour on a plant floor is the one where we look at your drains, your washdown routine and where the floor has already failed, before anyone writes a number down. Nine times out of ten the failure is at the drain throat or the wall junction rather than in the middle of the floor, which changes the scope completely and usually reduces it.
A food facility is not one floor. The cook line, the packaging hall and the blast freezer each punish concrete differently, and specifying one system across all of it is how plants end up recoating in three years.
| System | Where it goes | Why it gets specified |
|---|---|---|
| Urethane cement, 6 to 12 mm | Cook lines, washdown bays, blast freezers, bottling and CIP areas | Manufacturer data puts a 6 mm build at roughly -25°C to +80°C and a 12 mm build at -40°C to +130°C, with occasional spillage to 150°C. That is why boiling washdown does not lift it the way it lifts standard epoxy. |
| Self-levelling urethane cement, 4 to 6 mm | Dry process, packaging, warehouse side | Seamless and cleanable, tough enough for pallet and forklift traffic, without paying for a full trowelled mortar where you do not need one. |
| Broadcast quartz epoxy | Prep rooms, coolers, corridors | Texture is built into the system rather than sprinkled on top, so the slip profile survives scrubbing. |
| Novolac epoxy topcoat | Fermentation, pickling, acid and CIP chemical zones | Novolac resists inorganic acids well past where standard bisphenol-A epoxy gives up, including concentrated sulfuric exposure on published product data. |
| Integral cove base, 100 mm | Every wall and floor junction, plinths and equipment bases | Removes the 90 degree corner that product, water and biofilm collect in. This is the single most common thing we find missing on an existing plant floor. |
Steam, caustic, hot oils and animal fats will find every weakness in a floor. Published resistance data on urethane cement systems covers 50% acetic acid, concentrated lactic acid at 60°C and 100% oleic acid at 60°C. The failure mode with ordinary epoxy is rarely chemistry anyway, it is thermal movement: epoxy expands at a different rate than the slab, and a boiling washdown cycle shears the bond. Cementitious urethane moves much closer to the concrete underneath it.
Book a Site VisitThe Safe Food for Canadians Regulations, section 57, require floors that are smooth, non-absorbent and impervious to moisture, that provide or permit good drainage, and surfaces capable of withstanding repeated cleaning and sanitizing. We specify to that language and hand you the manufacturer data sheets for your PCP file. What we will not do is tell you a floor is CFIA certified, because no such certification exists, and the USDA non-food compounds acceptance programme ended in 1998. Any plant being told otherwise is being sold something.
Read the GuidesWe work nights, weekends and shutdown windows, and we section the plant so one line keeps running while another is down. Standard urethane cement grades take traffic within about 24 hours at 8°C, and rapid grades in roughly 5 hours at 10°C, which is what makes a weekend changeover realistic.
See PricingWe are local, so the assessment is normally days away rather than weeks. We test the slab, write the scope and give you a fixed price, and you are not committing to anything by finding out.
Falls to drain generally run between 1:100 and 1:80. Channels go near equipment, never underneath it, with prefabricated profiles at the channel edges.
ANSI A326.3 sets 0.42 wet DCOF for interior wet areas and 0.55 where oils and greases are present. We build cook lines and wet process to 0.55, and we will tell you plainly that the standard itself says DCOF does not predict whether someone slips.
Blast freezer thresholds, retort areas, steam kettles and rack washers all get a thicker build than the room around them.
Cove up the wall, cove up the plinth, seal the interface. Cleanable geometry beats a cleanable coating.
Moving joints get honoured through the system, not buried under it. Buried joints telegraph and split within a season.
Allergen zones, raw versus RTE separation and traffic aisles marked into the floor rather than taped onto it.
Burlington is our home base, which in practice means a shorter lead time and easier site visits than anywhere else we work. The industrial stock along Harvester Road, Mainway and the North Service Road is mature and generally straightforward to get into, with real dock access and room to stage. What catches people out here is the slab, not the schedule: a lot of these floors have been sealed, patched, painted and re-sealed over forty years, and all of that has to come off before anything new goes down.
Being based in Burlington means we can usually get eyes on the floor within days rather than weeks, and take moisture readings on the same visit.
Old coatings, sealers and shake-on hardeners are removed mechanically to the profile the new system needs. This is the step that decides whether the floor lasts.
We work in sections around your hours, then hand over data sheets, a maintenance sheet and a 5-year warranty on the installed system.
Twenty-seven Google reviews, a 5.0 average, and Christopher replies to every one of them personally. Being based in Burlington also means the people who quoted your floor are the people who show up to install it.
"I had the pleasure of working with Surface Coating Experts, owned by Christopher, on a project in our condominium where one of the balconies and walkways required a complete repair."
What customers mention most: garage floor installation, epoxy quality, detailed work, and a smooth process from first quote to finished floor.
Every review gets a personal reply from the owner - the after-the-job care that keeps the rating a perfect 5.0.
This is not a sales call with a clipboard. Burlington is our home base, so the assessment is quick to arrange and we already know the building stock: Harvester Road and North Service Road floors that have been sealed, patched and re-sealed for forty years, and 407 Corridor buildings where the concrete is still green. Both are workable. Both need testing first.
Free. No obligation. Usually within the week.
Prefer to talk it through? Call (905) 876-6957, Monday to Saturday, 6am to 6pm.
Tell us where the floor is and what runs on it. We will come out, test it and put a fixed price in writing.
Same service nearby: Food & Beverage in Oakville · Food & Beverage in Hamilton
We are based in Burlington, so the assessment itself is usually days away rather than weeks. What takes real time is materials on a specialist system, and the mitigation step if the slab tests wet. Getting the testing done early does not commit you to anything, it just means the date you eventually pick is a date we can actually hold.
Also see our industrial & commercial overview, epoxy flooring in Burlington and published pricing.
We are based in Burlington, so a site visit is usually days away rather than weeks. Tell us the square footage and what the floor has to survive, and we will test it and price it properly.
Free, no obligation, and you keep the written scope whether you use us or not.