We had a very early start to the day, our transport was scheduled for 6:00 am. We began the day with a trip to Royal FloraHolland and the best way I can describe it is, organized chaos and it was fascinating. There are so many people driving around on these carts pulling small trailers of flowers. There is always movement happening, when you track the path of one cart you don’t understand what they are doing yet there is a flow among the drivers, each one executes each turn with confidence knowing where they are going. What I found interesting is the process the flowers go through from their delivery here to the warehouse to being shipped to the consumer, within the business of the floor is an efficient system that allows for these flowers to be sent within 90 minutes. The entire warehouse is 1,732,769 square meters. Everywhere you looked it would seem as if the warehouse continued on. It reminded me of many assembly lines that took place at once, assembly lines very similar to ones used to manufacture cars in the US and around the world. From my visual understanding the flowers would leave their storage areas and be sent to one of many buffer zones, where there would be a worker ensuring nothing went wrong. Then a worker on a cart would take the carts and drive them to a certain location, I was unable to find what exactly happened. Another worker would drive around their cart with a paper most likely saying which flowers needed and where they are located, when finished it would be sent to the Aalsmeer shuttle. It would take the flowers, lift them and transport them 18 kilometers to the customers’ packaging area located across the road. The shuttle cuts a 45 minute travel with a driver down to 10 minutes. Fun fact: Each individual shuttle travels about 39,000 kilometers per day, which is nearly a full circle around the Earth. (https://izi.travel/en/1d44-the-aalsmeer-shuttle-video/en)

Walking around the warehouse it made me think about how this system was created, and how many parts there are to the operation. Going back in time, how did they even do it before anything was automated? There were many parts where you saw automation, like barcode scanners and tracks that would direct the carts and the shuttles that would transport information of its cargo also through barcodes. Yet the amount of people working on the floor was astonishing. 

The next part of the day we traveled to De Tulperij, a tulip farm that grows tulips and other flowers for the bulbs. It is a interesting process which could take 1-2 years for flowers like tulips but up to 4 years for others flowers. I learned a lot about the process of growing the flowers before they are ready to be sent to customers. We were told about differentiating sick flowers for the rest and they had to take care of their fields so that they could be certified to sell. It didn’t occur to me that one sick flower could have such an impact. Additionally when it came to selling the bulbs they would split the inventory. They would use slightly more than half to replant and the rest would be sent to be sold.  

Overall there is much more going on in the flower and tulip business than I thought from the method flowers are grown to how they are sold and delivered.