Urethane cement and epoxy systems for Hamilton 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 across Hamilton, Stoney Creek, Ancaster, Dundas and Mount Hope. 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.
In Hamilton the compounding problem is building age. A Bayfront or Stoney Creek food plant is often working on a mid-century slab that has already been coated once or twice, so the failure you are looking at now is sitting on top of an older one that was never properly removed.
One unplanned shutdown almost always costs more than the floor would have.
Invest in Hamilton counts over 120 food and beverage manufacturers employing more than 9,500 people, with agribusiness contributing roughly $1.34 billion a year across the city and 679 farms in the boundary. Maple Leaf Foods runs on Glover Road in Stoney Creek, and the Ancaster Business Park lists food and beverage among its core tenants. The catch is building age. A Bayfront or East Hamilton food plant is often working on a mid-century slab with no vapour retarder, a shake-on hardener and decades of soaked-in product, and that is a preparation problem before it is a coating problem. Red Hill, Ancaster and the airport lands are far more straightforward.
Most requested in Hamilton: full washdown rebuilds with new coving and drain terminations.
Hamilton has the oldest industrial building stock of the three. Bayfront and East Hamilton slabs are frequently mid-century, poured without a vapour retarder, finished with a shake-on hardener and carrying decades of oil and coolant. That is a prep problem before it is a coating problem. Red Hill, Ancaster and the airport lands are newer and far more straightforward.
Hamilton food plants are also the most likely of the three cities to be operating out of a building that used to make something else entirely. A slab that spent thirty years under a fabrication shop carries oil and cutting fluid deep into the concrete, and that will reject a primer no matter how clean the surface looks after grinding. On any Hamilton conversion we degrease and bond test as a matter of course, and we will happily fail our own test and tell you the slab needs more work rather than warranty a floor we do not believe in.
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 PricingOn older Hamilton slabs the preparation is the whole variable, so we test before we price. Book the assessment and you get a fixed number rather than an estimate that moves once the grinder starts.
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.
Hamilton jobs get more preparation time in the quote than anywhere else we work, and that is deliberate. The Bayfront and East Hamilton building stock is old, hard-used and frequently contaminated, and the honest way to price that is to test before quoting rather than discover it on day two. The Red Hill business parks, Ancaster and the Mount Hope airport lands are newer and much more predictable, and we price those accordingly rather than applying a Hamilton premium across the board.
Moisture testing, a bond test on contaminated slabs and a look for shake-on hardeners. On older Hamilton floors this is the difference between a real quote and a guess.
Degreasing, shot blasting and repair are itemised rather than buried, so you can see what you are paying for and why the cheap quote is cheap.
Bay by bay, line by line, on nights and weekends. Fast-cure systems return traffic to a finished section in as little as 4 hours.
Twenty-seven Google reviews, a 5.0 average, and Christopher replies to every one of them personally. On the kind of floors Hamilton has, an owner-operated crew that tests before it quotes is worth more than a bigger name.
"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. Hamilton has the oldest industrial building stock we work in, and the honest way to quote a Bayfront or East Hamilton floor is to test it rather than look at it. That is why our Hamilton assessments take longer than most, and why our Hamilton prices tend to hold.
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 Burlington · Food & Beverage in Oakville
On older Hamilton slabs the preparation is the variable, and we would much rather find that at the assessment than halfway through your job. Second, plant, hangar and warehouse shutdown windows get booked early here. If you have a date in mind, the useful move is to get us in front of the floor well ahead of it.
Also see our industrial & commercial overview, epoxy flooring in Hamilton and published pricing.
Tell us the square footage, what runs on the floor and what has already been tried on it. On older Hamilton slabs we test before we price, so the number you get is the number.
Free, no obligation, and you keep the written scope whether you use us or not.