At the the same time Flowerbud’s elegant little green boxes zoom around the night skies of the USA there are much larger and far less elegant boxes rushing headlong to these shores bearing flower riches from around the globe. The first stop for many being Miami which handles an amazing 88% of all imported flowers. That amounts to some 32,000 boxes per day. If that number leaves your mouth agape then consider that the days before Mother’s Day see around 62,000 per day.Large commercial flower box sometimes referred to as masters or coffins can come in sizes such as 48×20x16. No shrinking violets in their demand for cargo hold space!
Flower cargo into Miami remains predominantly from growers in Colombia and Ecuador but increasingly comes from further afield as in Australia, Kenya and of course Holland which remains the worlds largest flower producer. Believe it or not the businesses in Miami, as gargantuan as they seem, would like to see more growth. Unfortunately they and people like myself face the difficulty of persuading the US consumer to perform more along the lines of their European counterparts who spend four times the amount per annum, seeing flowers as a worthwhile addition to a life beyond the special occasion gift.
The dollar value on all these flowers into Miami is closing in on $1 billion.The end result being close to a $7 billion US cut flower industry with a good Mother’s Day accounting for a healthy $2 billion of that. Big numbers that yet represent a lagging consumer demand for what I view as better and better product.
What happens to 62,000 boxes that pour out of aircraft holds in a single day? Imagine the around the clock infrastructure! It used to be just a case of US customs clearance, Dept of Ag inspections for pests and DEA inspections for drug shipments. To that list of hurdles we can now add X-ray checks for bioterrorism. With the headache of taking just one trip through any airport in order to take a flight today one can appreciate the toil involved with obtaining a clean bill of health for a box of flowers! So how about making all this work worthwhile? Let’s show those Europeans that we can spend more money on flowers, not just on gasoline these days. Help empty these giant cold rooms, go treat yourself and others to flowers. They really are very good for your state of mind…… and there are more on the way.
flowers usa…
I never thought I will agree with this opinion, but you know… I agree partially now…