The Golden Trowel has been presented for 36 years to contractors who produce the world’s flattest and most level floors. They are awarded in several different categories, based on how the floor was initially struck off, how wide the floor castings are, how much shake-on hardener or steel fibers were used, and other factors that influence flatness and levelness. Golden Trowel Gold Plates are awarded to the winner in each category, while Golden Trowel Silver Plates recognize truly outstanding entries that achieved exceptional results but did not dominate the category. The thought behind the genesis of the Golden Trowel was that competition might drive up quality. That thought has been proven conclusively to be true, year after year. The best floor in the world back in 1990 wouldn’t even be considered for a Golden Trowel today. And North America no longer dominates the awards. North America was shut out of the world records in 2019, won only one of two new world records in 2020, and was shut out again in 2021. The only new World Record this year was from Vietnam. And in 2024, of the 9 Gold and Silver Trowels awarded, 7 were from Brazil, China, Vietnam, and Thailand, and only 2 were from the USA! That’s quite a change from the recent past, when the USA dominated the awards.

Why are floors so much better now? People continue to learn how to use existing concrete placing and finishing tools to better advantage and are passing on that knowledge and skill to new generations of concrete finishers. Concrete floor consultants are learning what works and what doesn’t, and are teaching the best practices. And batch plants are being held to high standards on the concrete that they deliver to the field. The tools available are better than they were, even just a few years ago. The Somero Laser Screed revolutionized the way concrete could be struck off. As laser screeds got better and better, and as people learned the best ways to use them, the flatness and levelness of floors improved significantly, even as daily output was dramatically increased. All these factors have made a big difference in the flatness and levelness of floors. But so has striving for excellence and for the recognition that comes from being the best in the world – a winner of the Golden Trowel.

Over the first 25 years of the Golden Trowel® contest, we had winning entries from North and South America, Australia, and Europe, but not one from Asia. Because we noted that floors in Asia were neither as flat nor as level as floors in the West, and because floors in the West were constantly improving, it appeared to us that Asia might never catch up to the rest of the world without some incentive. 2024 2 For this reason, the Face Company inaugurated the “Golden Trowel Asia” contest in 2015. The Golden Trowel Asia is a special award available only to contractors in Asia. There have been a total of 26 Golden Trowel Asia Awards won by 14 different contractors from China, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, and Indonesia. The quality of floors has been improving very rapidly in Asia, at least for a small number of concrete floor contractors. This is obvious when you note that three of this year’s five Golden Trowels and half of the Silver Trowels are going to contractors in Asia!

2024 Golden Trowels

DINCO Engineering & Construction is a company in Da Nang, Vietnam that produces floors the old fashioned way: Hand-screeding the floors, but taking meticulous care to get the elevations right when they strike off the concrete. They use a Rod and Level to shoot the elevations on the floor every 300mm (every 1-ft) and then they scrape the high spots down and fill the low spots with dry shake before finishing the floor. This process is painstaking and manpower-intensive, but apparently they really know how to do it, because they produced a large (128,000 sf) and wide (72 ft wide) floor at Quang Tri, Vietnam, with a World-Record levelness of FL 113.4, blowing the socks off the previous record. Traditionally, hand-screeded floors have the worst FL Numbers of any type of floor, but not here.

Aside from that hand-screeded floor, this year’s Golden Trowels are in a relatively small number of categories dominated by the Laser Screed. It seemed as if everyone wanted to compete in one of the Laser Screed categories, so a few of the very best floors outshone many quite excellent floors. Even the third-and-fourth place floors would have been good enough to win just a year or two ago.

For the past few years, Brazil has been a center of excellence in flat floor technology. We had many entries from Brazil this year, but Gran Nobre Pisos Industriais, from São Paulo, Brazil, outshone the others by producing not one, but two winning floors in the large Laser Screed category (over 100,000 square feet) and the ultra-large Laser screed category. (over half a million square feet) In the Large Laser Screed category, they produced a 211,000 sf floor in São Paulo that measured FF 118 and FL 115.4, and it had 4 Kg/m2 Dry Shake. Any time both your FF and FL Numbers are above 115, you have a very special floor. Gran Nobre Pisos also produced a huge 600,000 sf floor, with 74 ft (very wide) pours at Itupeva, São Paulo and achieved FF 109.9 / FL 87.2. It’s hard to get the same high F-Numbers over and over again, day after day, for 49 separate pours.

Chengdu Keyixin Technology Co., Ltd., from Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China, won their first “Golden Trowel Asia” in 2019, then went on to win their first Golden Trowel in the worldwide contest in 2020. They got a Golden Trowel this year for using a Copperhead to produce a floor of almost 100,000 sf, with 76 ft wide bays, at Chengdu, Sichuan, China, that measured FF 94.2 / FL 100 – and this floor had 6 Kg /m2 Dry Shake and 45 Kg/m2 Steel Fibers.

The Nutcon Corporation Co., Ltd., from Nongtumlueng, Thailand, produced another Golden Trowel winner this year. It was a relatively small (84,000 sf) Laser Screed project at Chonburi, Thailand with 85 ft wide bays that came in at FF 116.4 / FL 101.8.

2024 Silver Trowels

Silver Trowels are a sort of “Distinguished Honorable Mention” category. Silver Trowels are not awarded in every category, but as you will see below, sometimes a floor that would have won a Golden Trowel, is overshadowed by an even more spectacular floor the same year. This kind of a floor deserves recognition and is awarded a Silver Trowel.

As noted above, Chengdu Keyixin Technology Co., Ltd. won a Golden Trowel this year for a Copperhead project. Chengdu Keyixin also produced another floor, over 100,000 sf and 72 ft wide, with 7 Kg /m2 Dry Shake and 45 Kg/m2 Steel Fibers at Deyang, Sichuan, China that was won a Silver Trowel in the large Laser Screed category. This floor was FF 93.8 / FL 94.5, and it would have won Gold in 2018.

VEMAC Inc., out of El Paso, produced a high quality floor in a very unusual way. The floor was 223,000 square feet, the pours were 245 ft wide, and it was produced in two pours on two days, which, incidentally, were in the desert outside El Paso and had 40-degree temperature swings. They told me that they wanted to see how far they could push the limit of technology. They did, and they got a very respectable FF 73.2 and FL 53.5.

Xi’an Beaver Concrete Floors Co., Ltd., from Shannxi, China, produced a Laser Screed floor that had an FF Number of 84.0 that is rather ordinary by Golden Trowel standards, but a truly fantastic FL of 127.0. The judges sometimes must compare one project with extraordinary FF Numbers against another project with wonderful FL Numbers. In this case, we can sum the FF + FL Numbers to obtain a sort of “overall score” for comparison. When we did this, Nutcon’s Laser Screed floor in this category just beat out Beaver for the Gold. Last year, Beaver would have won the Gold with this floor in Xi’an City, Shaanxi, China.

We have seen large floors before in the Golden Trowel competition. We have had a number that were over 1 million square feet, and some at 1.6 million square feet, but this year, Eldridge Concrete Construction, from Newton Grove NC, produced a floor at Ellabel, GA, that was just short of 2 million square feet, the largest that we have ever seen in Golden Trowel competition, and got FF 107.6 and FL 55.7. The only reason they did not win gold was because Gran Nobre Pisos’ Lyon project, also huge, had higher numbers.

A total of 153 different contractors from North and South America, Europe, Central America, Asia, and Australasia have claimed the 398 Trowels awarded in the contest’s 36-year history (1989 through 2024)