Firm Overcomes Slew of Challenges to Thrive in Decorative Stone Biz

Thu July 27, 2023
CEG

Christopher DeFeo started DeFeo Materials in 2016 with one tri-axle dump truck hauling bulk materials.

Prior to starting the company in Connecticut, DeFeo had worked in the agricultural industry in the Midwest, where he gained exposure to many different types of equipment and the harvesting process for many different commodities that were shipped in bulk. Once DeFeo moved back to Connecticut, he started working in the construction industry, which laid the foundation for what would become DeFeo Materials.

DeFeo Materials main focus is to produce and distribute decorative stone products to wholesale landscape supply yards up and down the east coast — it supplies over 15 different products to approximately 200 different customers across the east coast.

"It's common knowledge that the housing market has been very strong in the southeastern United States for a prolonged period of time," said DeFeo. "Over the last decade, both builders and developers have become aware of the environmental benefits of using decorative stone in the landscape process versus other options such as mulches and pine straw. You are conserving water as well as not having to buy, reapply and pay to have the mulch or pine straw redone every year.

"And a big benefit is the stones keep their color year-round," he added. "Once you put the stones down, they pay for themselves in two or three years and in the long term it is substantial savings, especially for commercial properties that spend a fortune on spreading mulch every year."

This market opened up for DeFeo when a gravel pit in New Jersey fell behind on supplying product and could not supply a stone yard in western N.C. When DeFeo Materials delivered the product, they asked the customer "how much more of this would you like" and her answer was "Honey, you could never bring me enough."

At that point, DeFeo knew it had tapped into a great market, and it has been exploding ever since. But to properly serve the market, some changes needed to be made in the mode of transportation.

"As we started to develop the market with more and more customers, we realized that this just wasn't going to happen with truck delivery," DeFeo said. "People don't want to drive trucks over the road anymore, and there are not enough bulk commodity trailers. Frameless dump trailers are how the majority of bulk commodities are transported. There are just not enough trucks available to move our type of material in the volume that we need transported, and still be able to do it economically.

"There are not enough loads of other bulk commodities heading north to bring back the trailers, so you have no backload, which skyrockets your transportation costs. The other issue, and it is a constant problem with hauling over the road, is battling the strict rules and regulations with DOT, equipment breakdowns and the general cost of trucks and trailers, which are increasing at an unbelievable rate."

DeFeo was determined to find a way to work around this transportation challenge.

"I have always loved working with big equipment and have been fascinated with the idea of producing products in large volume. I'm a numbers guy, so it was something that I could break the numbers down and analyze.

"The supply of natural minerals and stone in the northeast is abundant. As a teenager, I was in the landscaping business and really liked the way decorative stone looks when it is applied, particularly in commercial applications, around medians, apartment complexes and hotels. I think it's a great touch to the property and doesn't look old after only a couple months like mulch."

"We were told by our customers that when other quarries run out of decorative stone, they throw up their hands and turn away customers rather than finding a solution to produce more product. I realized that if we could use technology, it would help improve efficiency and we could tap into a market with huge potential. But we first had to figure out the issue of transporting our product 800-plus miles."

DeFeo then started hiring out trucks and building a network of trusted subcontractors, like Taylor Trucking, RLO Trucking and many more to be able to grow the volume of stone, without spending more capital on additional company owned trucks.

"They typically will each take about two loads a week and that represents a good amount of tonnage for us, but it still was not enough to satisfy what I was trying to build. The game changer was in 2020 when we started shipping by rail. We invested every last dollar, even sold a portion of the company to investors to build a loading area at our Utica, N.Y., rail yard. The first year we transported about 3,800 tons of our product by train and by the end of this year it will be around 75,000 tons."

Once rail transportation and its benefits were implemented, it was a huge challenge, but a total game changer. DeFeo now has sites located with railway access along the east coast, where they stockpile product and use their fleet of equipment to load and unload their fleet of rail cars, where it is then shipped to various distribution yards and delivered in the southeast.

Even with the implementation of rail distribution, DeFeo still has challenges to overcome. Distribution from the rail depots to the end user and getting orders filled within its goal of a 10-day time limit is particularly challenging when you're moving thousands of tons of stone thousands of miles. Quality control also is essential — the stones must be sorted correctly by size, and they must be clean.

DeFeo's largest distribution point is in Utica, N.Y., from which it ships its most popular product, New England River Rock. It has other smaller loading facilities in New England from which it distributes some of its smaller volume products.

Utica has been an ideal location for DeFeo, even though the company is New England-based, as the northeast provides the ideal glacier created, multi-colored stones that its customers are looking for.

"The Mohawk and Northern Adirondack Railroad (the railroad in which DeFeo ships from) treat us very well. They appreciate our business and we have become one of their largest customers. Anything that we need they have been willing to work with us on."

"In Utica, our current storage is about 12,000 tons. It could be more; but our production is limited by the weather. In this region you can only produce for about seven months out of the year, as the winters are harsh and the cold temperatures do not allow us to screen any product."

A significant portion of its product is sent to DeFeo's yards in North Carolina. DeFeo additionally works alongside Vulcan Materials, at their Mount Holly, SC rail yard, who handles the distribution of DeFeo's product in the Charleston and Savannah regions. This allows customers in these areas to pick up their most popular product, New England River Rock.

When asked where their material comes from DeFeo said, "Our stone comes from about six different gravel pits that we work closely with. I like to describe these gravel pits as family-owned mom-and-pop type shops. They really are focused on just being able to get the sand out to sell to concrete plants."

"We are purchasing from them a byproduct of sand production, any gravel that is above half an inch. We can't pull it all from just one location because number one, there's just not enough material, and number two, we blend the gravel from the different locations, creating the multi- colored products offered"

DeFeo takes all of its mixed stone ranging in sizes from half-inch up to 12 in. and piles it in one large stockpile where it is screened and separated by size using an EvoQuip Colt 600 screening plant.

"The EvoQuip was our first screening plant, and it has been an amazing machine. It's a compact plant that's relatively new to the market. We work it very hard, and it has been extremely durable, giving us little or no downtime. We had considered buying a simple box screen and I'm glad we did not do that. The productivity we get out of this machine far exceeds anything that would have happened with a simple box screen plant."

"We purchased the machine from Powerscreen New England. As a dealership, they have been wonderful to work with, and their sales rep, Graham Wiley, has been invaluable as a resource."

"What really makes Graham and the entire Powerscreen team fantastic to work with is their willingness to come out and work with you side by side in the field. They worked with us through the entire set-up process, showed us how to keep our repairs and maintenance costs down, and how to keep our production levels up without losing quality. If we experience issues that they were not familiar with, they are immediately reaching out and working with Terex in Ireland to get answers."

"We get an added bonus with our sales rep Graham because he is a mechanical engineer, and he understands how the equipment actually works. We moved about 80,000 tons of product last year and our goal this year is 100,000 tons, so we are always expecting more from our equipment. What comes with that is expecting more from the vendors we work with."

DeFeo separates the fines and oversized gravel with the EvoQuip, then they process the gravel further by their latest addition to DeFeo's equipment fleet, a Terex M 1700X rinse plant.

"Terex refers to it as a wash plant, we call it a rinser, but by whatever name you want to call it we love it. It was the perfect option for us. We met with the owner, Seamus Sheelan of Powerscreen New England, and he and Graham Wiley felt strongly that this was the right machine that we were looking for to clean our stone.

"They took our needs very seriously and invited us to go to ConExpo to meet with some experts, which is where we made the final buying decision. We went with the Terex M 1700X for several reasons — most importantly is that it is self-powered and self-contained. That allows the water to be directed back into our settling tanks.

Another feature that was important to DeFeo Materials was the large feed hopper, at 14-ft. in width.

"[This is] a big plus to us when other machines' hoppers are only 12 feet wide, and our loader bucket is all of 12 feet wide. If you're operating a loader of that size the extra two feet makes all the difference. It eliminates spillage and cleanup time.

"We measure our production from the onboard loader scale, so if we can't get the entire bucket of material into the hopper, we can't calculate our production. The hopper holds 10 yards, which allows us to put an entire bucket load from our Cat 980 in one pass, which is very efficient for us. It's an impressive machine, allowing us to run hundreds of tons of material in an hour. Our total fuel consumption has dropped to just over 10 gallons per hour to wash a hundred tons, improving our carbon footprint by almost 40 percent."

"The portable aspect of the M1700X is a huge benefit, allowing us to transport the machine to other aggregate producers and make products at their sites. We need to know that we can produce anywhere at any time."

"Terex worked closely with us to determine how much water capacity in our storage tanks we would need, what size pumps we would need, and what our water pressure requirements would be. All of this made us very comfortable that we were dealing with the right people."

Another key feature to the plant is its triple deck screen.

"That feature alone saves us 30 to 40 hours a year because we do not continuously have to change out our screen sizes. Because the plant rinses while it screens, we are not limited to screening under only dry conditions. Utica can be noted for its cloudy, dreary days, which can limit your production opportunities. The Terex M 1700X eliminates that concern.

"We are experiencing a significant spike in demand and because of the Terex M 1700X we have been able to keep up with the orders."

A big plus to the Terex M 1700X is it can be converted quickly and can be turned into a dry screening plant instead of a rinsing plant in less than one day, DeFeo said.

"There is an additional belt that goes on the bottom, and we can use this at different sites with different applications, where no water usage is permitted."

The rinsing plant was a critical purchase for DeFeo, which needs to ship clean materials to its customers — the product does not sell well when it is dirty because customers can't see the color and beauty of the rock. Without a wash plant, the best the company could do was run the stones through the screener multiple times, but it was not an adequate approach to cleaning the material. DeFeo had made a small, self-made contraption to wash the stones as they were being screened, but it just wasn't doing the trick.

"What you or I may consider a clean stone is a completely different standard to the homeowner and the landscaper. They do not understand that it would be a simple process to just hose off the product after it's put in place. They want it to look perfect when it's laid down. So, for our stone to be delivered very clean is critical. Even after washing, the stone gets dirty again during transportation. That's why we invested over $200,000 in the past year on asphalt and concrete floors where the stone is stockpiled. That way once we wash it, the stone stays clean. A lot of companies would think we're crazy to do that, but we really care about the quality of the products that we sell to our customers. But just as important, one of the biggest keys to our success is our amazing employees that have worked as a team to help us grow."

For more information, visit www.discountriverrock.com. CEG

This story also appears on Construction Equipment Guide.