Presented by Face® Construction Technologies, Golden Trowel® Awards recognize the flattest and most level floor slabs placed in the world in the previous contest year. To date, 389 Golden Trowels have been presented to 151 different contractors on five continents. Golden Trowel® Gold Plates are awarded to the winner in each category; Golden Trowel® Silver Plates recognize outstanding entries that did not win their category.

A special Golden Trowel®, The “Sam” Award, was established in 2002 to honor “outstanding accomplishments in and contributions to the art and science of high-quality horizontal concrete construction.” The Sam is named in honor of Samuel A. Face, Jr., the late Chairman of The Face Companies.

The 2023 Golden Trowel® contest year ran from September 1, 2022 to August 31, 2023. Winners are announced each year at The World of Concrete in Las Vegas.

Applications for each year’s contest are due by September 30. Email info@dipstick.com

The Face® Companies also present The Golden Trowel® Asia Awards only to contractors and projects in Asia. The first Golden Trowel® Asia was presented in 2015.

Over the first 25 years of the Golden Trowel® contest, we had winning entries from North and South America, Australia, and Europe, but not one from Asia.

Because we noted that floors in Asia were generally neither as flat nor as level as floors in the West, and because floors in the West were constantly improving, it appeared to us that Asia might never catch up to the rest of the world without some incentive.

For this reason, the Face Company inaugurated the Golden Trowel Asia contest in 2015. The Golden Trowel Asia is a special award available only to contractors in Asia, for producing the flattest and most level floors in all of Asia, excluding the rest of the world.

The first Golden Trowel Asia was awarded in 2015; three more were awarded in 2017, five in 2018, and seven more this year. Winners have come from China, Thailand, Singapore, Japan, and Malaysia. It is apparent that the contest has had an effect, because as noted above, we had two world records this year from Asia, one from China and one from Japan.