by Garry Legnani, Ph.D., Senior Postharvest Scientist - FloraLife
The floral wholesaler serves a vital role in our industry – providing flowers and hard-goods for retail florists and event planners on a moment’s notice. The floral wholesaler faces unique challenges - processing countless flower types from multiple suppliers, consolidating and delivering numerous orders to customers, and maintaining a well-stocked retail cooler. Some have fleets of retail bucket trucks while others may manufacture bouquets in-house for supermarkets in the area. Flexibility and adaptation to changing market trends is crucial for success and many wholesale operations are now shipping orders using courier services.
In my 20+ years with Smithers-Oasis/FloraLife as a post-harvest scientist, I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with the traditional wholesale channel and have conducted numerous audits and post-harvest training seminars for wholesale operations throughout the US. Based on this experience I wanted to share some best practices that should help the floral wholesaler provide higher quality fresh cut flowers to their customers.
Cooler Temperatures
I thought we should address cooler temperatures first as it relates to most of the topics in this article. Recommended cooler temperatures are 1.0 and 3.0C (34-38F) for most flowers. Tropical flowers sensitive to chilling injury should be stored in a separate cooler at 12C (55F). I would like to say that these temperature recommendations are non-negotiable, but I realize that a high traffic retail cooler can be a real challenge to maintain set temperatures. Remember the time/temperature relationship – the longer the flowers spend outside the cooler the shorter the vase life.
Sourcing Flowers
It all starts with sourcing high quality flowers. Addressing customer complaints and credits due to poor quality flowers is obviously not a valuable use for your employees’ time.
Visiting the farms of your primary suppliers is essential to sourcing quality flowers. Is the operation clean? Are newly harvested stems being hydrated and cooled down in a timely manner? How are they treating flowers that are susceptible to botrytis and ethylene damage? How do they pack their boxes to reduce physical damage? Can they recommend long-lasting cultivars?
Keeping records of customer complaints and credits can help you weed out inconsistent suppliers and develop a go-to supplier list for various flower types. While processing credits is frustrating, it is valuable information that should be retained.
Also consider asking your loyal customers to inform you when the quality of the flowers they receive is exceptional. In our post-harvest lab, we obtain our flowers from a local wholesaler and often have specific requests (e.g. mums with excellent foliage quality). When we received exceptional flowers, I make sure to let them know that the grower provided excellent product.
Sanitation
No segment of the cut flower industry is exempt from good sanitation practices. Reducing the microbial load on your cut flowers is essential to maintaining quality. Utilize a proper floral cleaner and have protocols in place to clean buckets, cutters, work surfaces, and coolers. Concentrated floral cleaners can easily be dispensed by a dosing system. Some wholesalers will cut a plastic drum in half and mount it to a frame to make an inexpensive bucket washing station.
Proper floral cleaners will have longer residual -microbial control compared to chlorine bleach. They contain detergents to remove dirt and depending on the product should not require rinsing of newly washed surfaces.
Divide your sanitation protocol into daily, weekly and monthly tasks. For example, work surfaces and cutters should be cleaned daily, buckets weekly or when replacing solutions, cooler walls and floors should be given a thorough cleaning every 3 months to reduce the spore load from botrytis that can build up over time. Pay special attention to cooler floor drains that accumulate plant debris – these can be a source of botrytis. Cooling fans and condensers should be serviced and cleaned regularly.
Receiving Incoming Flowers
Flower deliveries can arrive at all hours. If possible, provide the trucking company with access to a receiving cooler to drop off deliveries outside of normal working hours. This will maintain the cold chain. When flowers are received during normal working hours it is good practice to randomly open several boxes and check flower head temperatures using a needle thermometer. If flower-head temperatures exceed 6C (43F), let your trucking service know that this is not acceptable and consider removing box tops to quickly cool down the flowers.
Processing Incoming Flowers
Processing a delivery of flowers at a wholesale operation can be chaos. You try your best to get flowers re-cut and into holding solutions and in the cooler as quickly as possible, all while having to answer phones and help walk-in customers. Here are some suggestions to make this process more efficient:
- For wet stored flowers us a FloraLife® Flower Food with Express technology – FloraLife’s 200 series with Express no-cut technology has been widely accepted by the wholesale channel. Eliminating the need to re-cut most of your flowers reduces labor and saves time. Overall sanitation is improved as microbes are not transferred from stem to stem by the cutters, and the amount of stem debris is significantly reduced.
- Install a cold hydration system – this can be as simple as having a gravity fed holding tank in the cooler that you fill with your flower food use solution. Buckets can then be filled with chilled solutions that will more quickly lower the internal temperature of your cut flowers.
- For dry stored flowers, try to place them in the coldest part of your cooler or in a cooler with minimal traffic so you can maintain the temperature as close to 1C (34F) as possible. Many flower types can be successfully stored dry if cold temperatures are maintained.
Staging Orders
Staging and boxing mixed flower orders for customers that want 25 stems of 20 different flowers can be time consuming and not necessarily something you want to do in a cooler; however, if you want to do what is best for the flowers – this should be done in the cooler. Once orders are filled, they should remain in a cooler until it is time to load the delivery truck or get picked up by the courier.
Shipping Orders
There is one area that I think wholesalers can improve upon the most. I’ve seen pallets of mixed flower orders sitting on a warm loading dock for several hours waiting to be delivered. From a quality standpoint, this is counterproductive to all the careful care and handling these flowers received. Despite the negative effects of the warm temperatures, loading docks are likely to have the highest ethylene levels in a wholesale operation due to truck exhaust and forklift use. This is a particular concern in cold winter months when trucks may be kept running. Keeping completed orders in a cooler until it is time to load them on the trucks is what is best for the flowers.
Final Thoughts
We understand that change is difficult. You may have loyal employees that resist change because that’s the way they’ve done things for years. Explain why the operation is making these changes and how they will benefit the flowers. Ask your fresh cut team for their ideas and make sure they are involved in developing new procedures and protocols as they are on the front lines. The more involvement they have in the planning process the easier changes will be to implement.
Contact your local FloraLife representative for more information.
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