On our third day in Amsterdam, we had to get through the earliest start of the trip. By 6 AM, we were all ready to head out on our private shuttle to Royal FloraHolland. We came in knowing that the scale would be pretty incomprehensible, as Royal FloraHolland is the largest international flower distributor in the world. This location alone is the largest building in Europe by floor area with a size of about 250 football fields (~1.7 million square meters).

We had an amazing aerial view of the entire production facility, getting to see thousands of carts of flowers being taxied around the factory for their auction. What I found to be especially interesting was the sheer number of auctions going on around us. If my math was right, this location alone had more auction clock transactions than seconds in the day. It might be a little cheesy, but it was genuinely beautiful not just to see all these gorgeous flowers, but to see how smoothly the operation was running and at such a scale.

Seeing all of this coordination take place and connecting it to many of the things I’ve learned in my classes this past year was truly eye-opening and helped me to further understand the true importance of both my experiences and what I learn in class.

We wrapped up our tour of the auction facility, and headed over to De Tulperij ahead of schedule to see the ‘manufacturing’ process that happens before the purchasing and distribution process we had just seen. We met with the owner of the farm, Daan Jansze, whose family has been in the flower farming business for nearly 100 years.

He showed us around the farm, where he explained some of the very unique processes that go into the growth of the tulips that end up in the auctions we had seen earlier. Something I found especially interesting about what he told us was how mutations can create new color variations of tulips. He tied it to a story of when he went out to check on red tulips one day and right in the center with no size or height deviation from the rest was an orange tulip that he later used the bulb of to grow even more orange tulips. Because of the importance of the color or orange in Netherlands, the royal family is of the House of Orange, these tulips actually sell for about 30% more than the red tulips he had been growing.

Overall, these two visits to both the auction facility and the farm helped me to better understand the importance of sustainability within this industry and how important of a role the Netherlands plays in the global market for flower.