Today had an early start with us leaving on a bus at 6 am to head to Royal Flora Holland, the largest trading platform for plants and flowers in the world. This is a cooperative company of florists, whose purpose is to ensure that everyone involved in the flower making process is able to make a profit. The members of FloraHolland are thousands of growers who come from about 60 different countries. The main way that the flowers are sold is through auction clocks that allow consumers to bid online or in an auction room for the flowers they would like. We completed a self-guided tour of their main facility, which is a warehouse of over 1.7 million square meters (the size of 200 football fields). Suffice to say, it is a massive facility (with 2700 employees), and it was amazing to see how they all move so efficiently throughout the warehouse. They move around on motorized scooters that tow one to more than a dozen carts of flowers at a time. Upon arriving in the facility, flowers are brought to the required temperature controlled location. The auctioning begins at 6am and the facility is run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Once the delivery of the flowers is completed, the next days flowers are brought in. I haven’t seen many warehouses in the U.S., but I think this was a much more efficiently operated facility than anything there.
After leaving Royal Flora Holland, we headed to De Tulperij. This was a flower farm where we got to learn about how growing Tulips and other types of flowers was a multi-generational family-run business. The owner of the farm gave us a quick tour and taught us about how he cuts the flowers off the plant and sells the bulbs so that people can grow them at home. I was surprised that he cut the flowers off because I thought that they were the most valuable part, but he said his farm makes most of its money from selling the bulbs and that the flowers consume food that the bulb needs to grow. Since the bigger the bulb is the more valuable it is, it’s better to cut off the petals to make more money. I thought it was most interesting when he explained how farmers try to make new breeds of flowers, like tulips, so that they can have a rarer color or shape of flower that they can sell at a higher price. I guess this is kind of like the research and development division that most companies have to come up with new products. I also thought it was interesting from a bioengineering perspective because I am now wondering if a flower color that isn’t seen in nature, like black, could be bioengineered and help the farm make much more money. I think that would be a really cool thing to work on. Additionally, from a sustainability perspective, it was amazing to hear that De Tulperij never waters their plants. The sand is a good soil for their flowers that traps the water from nearby canals so that an irrigation system is not needed.
Overall, I learned that Dutch businesses tend to work together more than American businesses, as the cooperative shows. American businesses tend to compete and try to eliminate similar businesses instead of how these Dutch ones work together to ensure that everyone gets a part of the profits.