A nearly 80-year-old Lufkin concrete company joins a fast-growing East Texas family of builders.
When a business has been mixing concrete in the same East Texas town since 1947, it stops being just a supplier and becomes part of the foundation — sometimes literally — of the place it serves. That is the story of Contractor’s Supplies, Inc., the Lufkin-based ready-mixed concrete and masonry company that has now joined Texas Materials, the Texas-and-Louisiana operating arm of global building-materials company CRH.
Locals know the company simply as CSI. For nearly eight decades it has poured the slabs, driveways, foundations and parking lots that quietly hold our region together, while keeping contractors stocked with everything from rebar to safety gear. Over the years it grew well beyond Lufkin, adding ready-mix plants and supply yards in Nacogdoches, Tyler, Longview, Marshall and Athens — a footprint that traces the working heart of East Texas.
According to public source information, CSI will bring seven ready-mix plants, a fleet of mixer trucks and an experienced group of team members into the Texas Materials operation. Current concrete operations are led by Kevin Kipp, vice president of ready-mix for the East Texas and Louisiana area.
For readers wondering who Texas Materials is, the short version is: big. The company is part of CRH, the Dublin-based building-materials giant that trades on the New York Stock Exchange and operates more than 1,700 locations across North and South America. Texas Materials supplies much of the asphalt, concrete and aggregate behind the state’s road and infrastructure work, and it runs its East Texas operations out of offices in Lufkin.
What makes this more than a routine corporate deal is the pattern behind it. The CSI acquisition is the latest in a steady run of East Texas additions that has quietly reshaped who pours the concrete in Forest Country.
In 2024, the same company took on Few Ready Mix, the Jasper-area family business that Arthur Few started in 1954 and ran for years under the motto “our reputation is poured all over East Texas.” Few’s most visible job may be the emergency spillway at Lake Sam Rayburn, poured in the early 1990s and still standing guard west of the dam. When the family sold after roughly 70 years, they were assured the name, the phone number and the local crews would stay in place.
The roots run deeper still through East Texas Asphalt, the Lufkin company that has supplied the region’s asphalt and aggregate since 1958 from hot-mix plants in Lufkin, Paxton, Center and Livingston. It, too, now operates under the Texas Materials umbrella, tying aggregates, asphalt and ready-mix concrete into one connected operation.
Add it up and a picture emerges: aggregate from the pit, cement and asphalt from the plant, and concrete in the mixer truck — increasingly drawn from a single, vertically integrated network with deep East Texas ties. Company leaders point to infrastructure investment and steady population growth as the forces driving demand across the twelve counties of the Texas Forest Country.
For the families and business owners who read this magazine, the headline isn’t really the logo on the side of the truck. It’s that the people who pour our foundations, widen our highways and patch our county roads are still, mostly, our neighbors — now backed by a company with the scale to keep the trucks rolling. In a region built on hard work and long memory, that kind of continuity matters about as much as the concrete itself.
