Silvi Materials is on the move. Since May, this family-owned building materials supply firm has made a major corporate acquisition, opened new facilities, and set out an ambitious agenda for its future.
Silvi Materials operates a network of concrete plants, gravel and sand reserves, mining operations, rock quarries, and a barge terminal in both New Jersey and its home state of Pennsylvania. The company’s main customers are construction firms, contractors, government agencies, landscapers, and concrete manufacturers, and this vertically integrated firm also offers transloading and stevedore services, maintains warehouses, and operates commercial real estate.
Now, Silvi Materials has become a lot bigger. In a deal finalized this summer, the company acquired the assets and operations of Eagle Rock Concrete, a leading ready-mix concrete producer based in Raleigh, North Carolina. The newly acquired firm will now bear the name Eagle Rock Concrete, a Silvi Materials Company.
“We’re letting them run as a separate business, while reporting up to our headquarters in Fairless Hills,” explains Co-President Larry Silvi II. “We’ll be employing our best practices with them. We’re basically sitting back and watching how they do business before we implement any changes. We feel they do some things that we could learn from, and we’ve got some things they could learn from.”
Eagle Rock’s assets include nine high-production ready-mix plants, one greenfield, and 115 ready-mix trucks, most of them less than two-and-a-half years old. Thanks to the acquisition, Silvi Materials has gone from roughly 800 employees to nearly 1,000. The deal drastically expands the company’s market reach in the Southeast and enhances its regional logistics network for slag and cement distribution as well.
“I would say we’re very acquisitive,” says Silvi. “We are looking to continue to grow and expand, organically and through acquisitions.”
Indeed, Silvi Materials has also been on an organic growth spurt as of late. This fall, the company announced that it is building an import terminal at a deep water port in Morehead City, North Carolina. Once completed, the facility will feature a pair of 100,000-ton storage domes and specialize in Type I/II low-alkali cement and Grade 120 slag. Designed to receive overseas cement shipments while offering trucking and rail loadout, the terminal is expected to be in operation in the fourth quarter of 2027. Significant as the Eagle Rock acquisition is, “Our plan to build a deep water import terminal in North Carolina is as big, if not an even bigger financial commitment,” notes Silvi.
At present, the company is operating a temporary cement rail loadout site in Morehead City. This facility is receiving rail loads of cement from the company’s premier cement terminal based in Bristol, Pennsylvania.
Against this backdrop, the company also recently opened a new RexCon Mobile 12 concrete batch plant in Newark, New Jersey. Installation of the Newark plant was managed by an internal construction team, and the project included site grading, the installation of a mobile central-mix batch system, setting up trailers, and building on-site stockpile bins for aggregate.
Open since March of this year, the RexCon plant is strategically situated near Jersey City, the New Jersey Turnpike I-78, and Routes 1 and 9. With a capacity of 180 yards of concrete an hour, the plant can support an array of concrete mixes including foundational footings and high-strength applications. The RexCon facility complements an existing Silvi Materials site in East Newark, New Jersey and will be matched by more new branches down the road.
These days, Silvi Materials’ admirable work ethic and emphasis on quality is getting noticed. The company recently won the prestigious 2025 Excellence in Concrete Award for High Rise Construction from the Eastern Pennsylvania and Delaware Chapter of the American Concrete Institute (EPDACI). The team received this honor at a May 1 ceremony in recognition of its contributions to the construction of a 31-story concrete apartment building in Philadelphia. Silvi Materials provided ready-mix concrete for the building, which contains over 270 apartment units and five penthouse floors containing private balconies.
“To control heat of hydration, the foundation was poured using a custom 50 percent slag mix and a detailed thermal control plan,” explains a company press release. “From there, Silvi provided concrete for all vertical and horizonal structural elements.”
These achievements represent new milestones for a firm that was originally founded in 1947 by Laurence Silvi Senior. Over the decades, the team has taken on a slew of high-profile projects including the New Jersey Turnpike, the Garden State Parkway, and JFK Airport. Growth has been so significant in recent years that the company is looking to expand its corporate headquarters, a project expected to break ground next year.
Yet for all its success, the company leaders have not neglected the fun side of the business. When we spoke, Larry was excited to discuss a brand-new company concrete mixer outfitted in a striking Kelly green that matches the iconic throwback uniforms of the Philadelphia Eagles, as Silvi Materials has a partnership deal with the Eagles, who won the 2025 Superbowl.
In the midst of all this recent growth, Silvi Materials has also been undergoing significant internal changes including a massive IT infrastructure update. The update entails an overhaul of the firm’s customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) programs and is nearly complete. “Even though it was a long journey with a lot of bumps on the road, we’re on the one-yard line. When we first started this, one of the implementing companies said, ‘this is like ripping your central nervous system out of your body and putting in a new one.’ They were right,” Silvi says.
The IT overhaul fits with Silvi Materials’ technological and ecofriendly ethos. The firm has embraced a paperless office concept to reduce waste and established a cutting-edge e-ticket system that is centered on computer tablet data, not paper invoices. This high-tech mindset is also evident in company plans to establish a rail terminal in Ohio. Once operational, the terminal will have a rated capacity of 250,000 tons of cement a year and offer around-the-clock unattended loading in a process already in place at other facilities run by the company. “If you want to pick up a load on Christmas Eve at 9 p.m. and you’re registered and in the system, you can do it.”
The process runs as follows: a truck fitted with a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag pulls up at a company site. Camera systems take photos of the license plate and the driver. The driver’s credentials are run through the company database, and they enter a code that authorizes the emission of a certain volume of cement. When this level is reached, the driver receives an e-ticket which they sign for and then “he’s on his merry way,” Silvi explains.
Futuristic as this process might seem, it is comparable to filling up a car tank with gas at a self-serve station. The new plant will be based in central Ohio and should be operable “by the second quarter of 2026,” he says.
There are also discussions about using artificial intelligence (AI) to augment truck and equipment inspections. “You could set up a shed where you drive a truck or a piece of machinery through it, and AI takes a series of pictures and evaluates whether you’ve got worn hoses, whether you’ve got oil leaks, whether the piece of equipment is clean or not.” Plant managers currently do such inspections manually.
Significant proposed AI initiatives will have to wait until the company’s IT infrastructure is fully updated, however. “Once we get our ERP up and running, then we’ll go out and start evaluating different AI companies,” Silvi shares. “We’re thinking second half of 2026.”
Going forward, there are no plans to alter the company’s ownership status. Being a family-run business has worked for nearly 80 years, and company leaders see little reason to deviate from this path.
Indeed, Larry Silvi II forecasts a very bright future for the company. “I see us branching out further,” he says. “We’ll evaluate every opportunity as it comes up, based on population growth, ease of doing business, taxes, and labor.”
