After decades of supplying ready-mixed concrete, a Wincanton, Somerset, England company decided to retreat from the sector, only to return some years later armed with Liebherr drum mixers and a Liebherr batching plant.
Hopkins Estates is a true family business, founded in 1972 by Bill Hopkins – who remains at the helm as managing director – supported by his son Nathan and various grandchildren. Originally a property and development company, it grew into a multi-faceted organisation with interests in commercial and residential property, farming, transport and aggregates.
By 2018, the success of its concrete and aggregate operations had attracted the attention of several ‘majors’. It had been sold to Tarmac, leaving Hopkins more scope to focus on construction and farming opportunities. One of those opportunities was a large earthmoving project requiring a fleet of tippers. Unable to secure the vehicles locally, Nathan used his experience of the haulage market to acquire several trucks just as the country plunged into the COVID-19 crisis.
“It wasn’t our intention to get back into the haulage industry, but we were left with very little choice,” said Nathan. “The lack of availability on the tipper front was mirrored when we needed a large volume of concrete for one of our development projects.” Acquiring a fleet of four volumetric concrete trucks, the family was ‘back in the mix’, initially to ensure its in-house construction operations had a reliable source of material, but soon it was supplying an ever-lengthening list of external customers under the new brand name of Hop Mix.
With the business continuing to grow and a suitable site identified at the firm’s headquarters in Wincanton, Hopkins was now in the market for a batching plant and managing director Bill and son Nathan met Simon Cook, general manager of the concrete division at Liebherr GB, to discuss the options. “We had run several batching plants at our facilities in the past and wanted to ensure that we were able to obtain a consistently high level of productivity and quality from each batch,’ said Nathan. ‘Simon went through every detail with us, and that saw us settle on a 3m3 Mobilmix 3.0 plant.”
The Mobilmix 3.0 offers users up to 132m3 per hour output with Liebherr’s Litronic-MPS3 control system and is constructed so that break-down and re-assembly can be undertaken in just a few days. “The site we are currently on will be redeveloped, and knowing that we can easily relocate is a bonus for us,” added Nathan.
Batching plant manager Guy Stannett commented: “I’ve worked with a variety of plants over the years and have to say that this is one of the easiest and most productive systems I’ve used. We know that we can easily meet our current needs with this plant, and as things pick up, we have the assurance that we can keep increasing production when it’s required.”
Getting the concrete to sites quickly is the job of 11 Liebherr HTM 905 drum mixers mounted on Scania 420P XT chassis, allowing a 9m3 capacity. Hopkins knew exactly what it was ordering, as Nathan explained: “The drums have proved themselves for decades in the UK market. They’re exceptionally well made and very reliable, with everything being built to allow for easy operation whether loading, discharging or cleaning.”
The rapid uptake of Hop Mix concrete has proved to be a pleasant surprise for Nathan. “The trucks are all out almost every day, which has been a great start for us. We’re not going to predict any sort of volumes, but if we can carry on in the same vein as the first few months have been, we’ll be very happy.”
