With its brand-new office building and production hall, and its larger wharf, Ghent Aggregates has entered a new phase in its still very young history. The supplier of coloured and technical minerals and aggregates is a strong addition to North Sea Port’s building materials cluster, bringing added value where outsiders would not expect it. “We like to do things others don’t do”, says general manager Jonathan Kesteleyn.
It is one of those economic stories that start in a garage. In 2014, Jonathan Kesteleyn, a scion of a family active in sand and gravel for over 140 years and well-established in the port of Ghent, decides to go his own way and founds his own company. One where he can make full use of his expertise in the building materials business, but with a focus on specific minerals and aggregates. It was the birth of Ghent Aggregates, which Jonathan Kesteleyn describes as ‘a 100% independent combination of a young company and more than 100 years of experience in aggregates’.
Two years after its modest beginnings, Ghent Aggregates was ready for the next move and landed on a 6,000m2 plot at the Singel in the area between the Grootdok and the Sifferdok in Ghent (North Sea Port). “Volumes continued to grow and clients were asking for storage and more specialties, and I always had the intention to move back to the port of Ghent as soon as possible”, the general manager recalls. Six years later, the company finally settled down on a bigger spot, just a few hundred metres away from the first one, offering the room needed to take in shipments carried by barges and coasters.
Bringing expertise to special projects
The list of special projects Ghent Aggregates is involved in, is growing longer and shows how far-reaching the company’s expertise can be, and how varied the applications of the minerals and aggregates it handles are: walkways built with porphyry; a 3.2km-long race track in lava stone for a private stable where top horses are lodged, bred, and trained; glacial boulders for landscaping a public square; terrazzo granite flooring for a business centre; heat protection shields with high-temperature resistant aggregates, ion-isolated bunkers for cancer treatments, minerals for the ceramic industry, and so on. Closer to home, the company was implicated in a big project: the almost complete make-over of the Administrative Centre of the City of Ghent, where the lifting of underground layers by groundwater threatened to damage the entire complex where above-ground parts were demolished and thus the downward pressure was reduced. Ghent Aggregates was asked to supply the ballasting of the underground parking garage and take care of the full logistics operation. “We filled more than 300 big bags with 1,500kg of Rhine gravel in five days, delivered them in rotations of five loads per day, stored them underground at levels minus 1 and 2, and blew another 150t of river gravel between the scaffolds above ground. Six months later, we reversed the whole process, taking all the big bags out of the underground garage and sucking back up the loose-blown gravel. We then checked the quality of the material for possible contamination before reusing it as roofing or drainage gravel.”
New office building and production hall
In 2022, the site doubled in surface to 2.2 hectares and plans were drawn for the construction of a brand-new office building and production hall. Both opened at the start of this year. Total investment in buildings and equipment was EUR 3.5 million. The office building covers 220m2 at ground level and is built to high standards in terms of sustainability. A third of the roof is already equipped with solar panels. Outside, charging stations are ready to supply electrical vehicles with the power they need. The production hall adds another 1,100m² to the building complex. In it, Ghent Aggregates built a fully automated, largely self conceived bagging installation that can package materials in bags (starting at 20kg) and big bags, in the process sifting the products to guarantee their homogeneity, and washing, heating and drying them to clean them, and palletising and labelling the bags to the customer’s logo if wanted. “We try to do what others do not, and we aim at a high level of quality and service”, says Jonathan Kesteleyn. Automation is maximised up to the point that one operator (out of the seven people on the payroll today) can make the whole installation run. In open air, the company now has 75 boxes for the storage and stock keeping of a large variety of products, which thus are deliverable quickly, with a rapid turn-around of the trucks, Jonathan Kesteleyn adds. The whole wharf has been hardened to facilitate operations and avoid contamination or dirtying.
Niche business
Ghent Aggregates is aiming at a very specific niche in the larger building materials industry, the general manager explains. “We are not into the high-volume gravel and sand business. We deal with coloured and technical minerals and aggregates, and natural and synthetic gravels and pebbles – which we do not produce ourselves – that are required for high-quality technical and ornamental applications in sectors that range from the concrete industry and road construction to sports facilities and landscaping, to name just a few. We also deliver specific minerals for industry need.”
”It is a market that has its own fashion trends and is subject to the changing tastes of the market, he knows. “We always try to work in close cooperation with the client to find the product that perfectly matches his technical and aesthetical needs.” Being a niche business does not exclude worldwide sourcing. “We work directly with dozens of producers and quarries in and outside of Europe. But Europe, including Belgium, accounts for about 85% of origins. Spain, the UK, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Poland… we go where we can find the right material. We currently have more than seventy references in our product portfolio.”
Solid logistics
Last year, Ghent Aggregates distributed some 350,000t of material. That requires solid logistics, and being located in a port only yields advantages in this respect. “We embrace our location in North Sea Port and the multimodal capacities that come with it. More than 65% of our volume comes in using another transport mode than road haulage. We do not have stevedoring activities, but we can bring in ship loads, either by barges or coasters of 1,500 to 6,000t, via neighbouring terminals at the Grootdok or Sifferdok. Now that rates for coasters have come down and shipments grow bigger with some of our new product lines, their share should go up this year. Last year, we also received our first rail loads totalling more than 6,000t coming from the South of France. This also underlines the importance and necessity of being in North Sea Port with its infrastructure and possibilities.”
“Outgoing, we regularly use barges for bulk shipments to certain customers, sometimes with direct transhipment from coaster to barge, representing some 20,000t last year. Apart from Belgium, our commercial reach mainly extends to the United Kingdom, France, Luxemburg, and – to a lesser extent – the Netherlands. In Europe, our action radius can go up to 1,000km and more, but we also have clients in countries like Israel, Finland or far away destinations like the French island La Réunion for projects. We serve these markets with sea containers.”
New extension
Since the transfer to its new location, the lack of space has become less pressing. Still, Ghent Aggregates is in talks with the port authority for a further extension of its terminal, by adding an adjacent plot of land of two hectares. “We are in the final stages of negotiations”, Jonathan Kesteleyn indicates. Expanding bulk storage capacity for larger shipments of some products, storing big bags and bagged aggregates, are the main options he is thinking of for the new land.
