After a challenging 5:30 am wake-up, we all got on a bus and made our way to our first stop of the day, Royal FloraHolland. I wasn’t sure what to expect when we arrived, I knew it was a flower auction and that they packaged all types of flowers but I wasn’t sure if it would be more of a factory style or a straight-up action house.

Royal FloraHolland turned out to be much bigger and way more impressive than I thought. When we walked in, there were hundreds of workers on little motorized scooters that attached to carts of flowers which were then transported around the factory and prepared for shipping. Seeing how many flowers and how large Royal FloraHolland was cool to see, and also to think about from a business perspective. We were told that all the flowers that enter Royal FloraHolland are shipped within 48 hours which means they need to be extremely organized and fast with their procedures which they clearly were. It seems difficult enough to deal with the amount of volume that Royal FloraHolland had, but to have to clear it all in under 48 hours takes an extremely large amount of precision and group effort which was cool to see in action. Seeing an exporting operation this large makes me wonder how they started and what got them to this point. It also makes me wonder how often they run into issues with supply and what kind of systems they have in place to deal with unforeseen circumstances.

After we finished our tour in Royal FloraHolland, we made our way back to the bus and headed to the tulip fields

The tulip fields were by far the most interesting part of the day for me. The patch of red tulips that still remained was beautiful and a great place to take pictures, but my favorite part of visiting the field was learning about how they make their money. Before we arrived I assumed that the field made the majority of their money on the sale of the flower that they grow, but this is not the case at all. We learned that the biggest money maker for the farm is actually the bulbs at the bottom of the tulip flower. This is because they don’t actually sell the flowers directly to the consumer, but instead, sell the bulbs that grow the flowers to people who then grow and sell those flowers. One of the coolest facts that related to this was that the farmers will walk the fields and look for mutated flowers which then they can isolate and hopefully produce whole fields of in the future. Then, these mutated flower buds will sell more to those who want to grow flowers because there is less supply. Overall the tulip farm was extremely beautiful and the way that they go about making their money was unexpected but very interesting.

I especially enjoyed today’s activities as the concepts that surrounded both from the business side of things connected very well. We first got to see the distributor which takes in all the flowers and ships them off to different customers fast and efficiently so that the flowers are able to survive. Then we got to see earlier in the chain where the buds of the flower are grown, harvested and then sold to those who grow the flowers that end up at Royal FloraHolland.

Today was one of my favorite experiences so far as I learned so much about the business and how it operates, and I also got to enjoy the beautiful scenery that came with it!