Lauren Concrete grows with Austin using a 292-truck Mack fleet

All-Mack fleet helps drive company’s expansion

Everything is outsized in Texas: the heat seems hotter, the steaks seem thicker, the trucking fleets seem larger. And in Austin, the capital of Texas, the city just keeps getting bigger. Once a sleepy legislative backwater, the city now ranks among the largest in the country (population just shy of 1 million) and serves as a tech-immersed Lone Star Silicon Valley.

But building today's Austin skyline took a lot of trucks and a lot of concrete. Lauren Concrete has both. In many ways, Lauren Concrete is a microcosm of Austin itself. The company started in 1986 at the cusp of Austin's emergence and grew and grew right along with the city. Austin's long-running economic boom has sent the skyline higher and the trucks of Lauren Concrete farther.

Ronnie Klatt and his brother Ray started Lauren Concrete in 1986 with one plant, four trucks, and only a handful of employees. Lauren Concrete now owns three aggregate quarries and is a leading provider of ready-mix concrete in Central Texas. Their fleet includes 292 Mack Trucks, a combination of mixers and semis.

When asked why Lauren Concrete is all in on Mack, the company's vice president of operations, Robert Conrad, sums it up in a word: durability.

"That is probably the biggest thing. We are on road, off road every day. The trucks take a beating, and the Macks have proven to withstand the work that we do," Conrad says.

"Some of our trucks are going to drive a whole lot more miles than our mixer trucks because they are hauling in material from all over the state. They will have a lot more miles on them," Conrad notes, including one 2014 Mack Pinnacle with 849,382 miles on it.

The vast majority of Lauren Concrete's fleet, however, are mixers. And the Mack mixers are ready for whatever terrain Texas can throw at them.

"We go to a huge variety of sites. Some never leave the pavement. And out east the ground is very muddy, the central area is sandy loam rock, and out west the majority of the job sites are very rocky," Conrad says, describing a service area that spans hundreds of miles from the famed hill country to the more placid plains to the east.

Lauren Concrete employs a corps of close to 300 drivers. Truck drivers are chronically in short supply, but Conrad says the Macks are one of the things that keep them coming back, with the ample cab room and "automatic, easy-to-drive" trucks.

And those drivers are always on alert. Safety is a priority, and Lauren Concrete prides itself on its culture of careful.

"We are constantly preaching safety and getting out and looking, knowing where your truck stands. There is a lot of safety training," Conrad says.

The company deploys electronic tablets in trucks to push daily safety messages each morning, implements regular safety meetings, and posts signs at facility exits reminding drivers to "Think Safety in the Moment." This safety-first culture meshes seamlessly with the proprietary safety features that Mack Granite mixers offer for concrete delivery applications.

But whatever Lauren Concrete is doing in the heart of Texas, they are doing it in a way that keeps the customers coming back. "It's been a rough year," Conrad said of 2025, with much of the torrid construction that has defined Austin for the past decade cooling a bit. But even with the tough boom-bust Texas economic landscape, business is still moving along.

"We continue to keep up with demand, offering a superior product and world-class service," Conrad says.

The demand includes schools, roads, bridges, hospitals, residential work, and high-rises. Lauren Concrete's handiwork is everywhere in Austin, including its iconic "sail tower," which now dominates the ever-changing downtown skyline. The building's actual name is Block 185, and Lauren Concrete was pivotal in its construction, which Conrad estimates took 80,000 yards of concrete to complete

When it was time to pour the 9,000 12,066 yards needed just for the foundation—enough to fill approximately 240 school buses with concrete or create 800 standard-sized residential driveways—Lauren Concrete mobilized its entire fleet of Mack mixers for the overnight pouring. Personnel from the Operations Team at Lauren Concrete described it as a “ballet of trucks” as the Mack mixers came and went in a carefully choreographed dance.  Each truck took about 4 ½ minutes to unload, before the next came to take its place.

In addition to literally building the community, they also create community. You'll find crowds of curious kids with big smiles on their faces clamoring to get up close to a shiny orange and white behemoth Lauren Concrete mixer truck at Touch-a-Truck and other community events.

In more ways than one, Lauren is building the future of Austin—and Mack is helping them pave the way.