How is the floral industry able to supply all those roses for Valentine’s Day?
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How is the floral industry able to supply all those roses for Valentine’s Day?
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Listener Kevin Pritchard from Holland, Michigan, asks:
Where do all the roses for Valentine’s Day come from? How does the world meet the demand for a single day in February?
Nearly 1 billion cut flowers arrived in Miami just in time for Valentine’s Day this year, according to the Association of Floral Importers of America.
The U.S. isn’t the only country that recognizes the holiday. Feb. 14 is a day for love in Chile, Denmark, France, Kenya, Japan, the United Kingdom and more.
The growing popularity of Valentine’s Day has helped boost the global flower industry, said Kaitlin Simpson, an assistant professor of U.S. history at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
“It’s very much a celebration of romantic love, which is appealing across cultures,” Simpson said.
Supplying roses for Valentine’s Day is a labor-intensive process that requires taking into account past demand, hiring enough workers to harvest these roses and adapting to unforeseen weather events, floral industry experts told Marketplace.
Americans can seamlessly purchase roses in time for the holiday thanks to a reliable supply chain, but the process is more complex than they realize, said Kate Penn, CEO at the Society of American Florists.
“It’s not like you can all of a sudden just make all those additional rose plants and flower plants appear,” she said.
Most flowers sold in the U.S. are imported. About 60% of those stems come from Colombia and a quarter from Ecuador, Penn said. The remainder primarily comes from the Netherlands, Canada and Mexico, she said.
Rose breeders spend about seven years developing commercially viable blooms, taking into account petal and stem strength, fragrance and heartiness, Penn said. Once plant propagators get a new plant variety, they create the cuttings, then send them to growers around the globe.
“Roses are typically grown in controlled environments, often in greenhouses,” Penn said. “These growers are using environmentally friendly practices to protect against pests and diseases.”
Growers predict future demand based on trends from previous years. Those calculations were disrupted by the pandemic, when more people were sending flowers to housebound loved ones, Penn said. A grower’s customers will begin pre-booking products in November and December, helping them assess how many roses they’ll need to harvest.
They’ll also monitor their roses to ensure they’re in peak condition by the time Valentine’s Day rolls around.
“They will do careful pruning and maintenance practices so they are timing the roses to develop and have ready stems just a couple weeks before the holiday itself,” said Chad Miller, associate professor of landscape and ornamental horticulture at Colorado State University.
A primarily female labor force will harvest the flowers in Colombia and Ecuador, sometimes working 15-hour shifts in the lead-up to Valentine’s Day, Simpson said. Growers ramp up production and hire extra labor ahead of holidays, Simpson added.
Most flowers, especially roses, must be hand cut at just the right stage to ensure they’ll fully bloom, Penn said. Workers will then put flowers in nutrient-rich solutions and store them in highly controlled environments for shipping, which usually runs through Miami.
Growers are also highly attuned to how weather will affect their crops. If there’s a lot of rain, roses may emerge later.
“Sometimes that window for shipping is compressed into an even shorter than normal period … but somehow our industry makes it happen,” Penn said.
Flower production has shifted from the U.S. to other countries over the past century thanks to technological advancements and cheap labor.
The Colombian and Ecuadorian flower markets began developing and exporting their products between the 1960s and 1980s, Simpson said. Quicker and cheaper air travel enabled the floral industry to export roses from other countries with more ideal climate conditions and lower prices, while maintaining their quality, she explained.
“In part, their value lies in the fact that they wilt so quickly. They’re ephemera in that sort of way,” Simpson said.
Southern climates don’t have harsh winters, allowing flowers to grow year-round, Simpson added.
As Colombia and Ecuador gained prominence in the floral industry, so did Kenya’s flower industry. The East African country exports roses to the Middle East, Russia and some other European countries, Simpson said.
“They’re grown outside of Lake Naivasha in Kenya,” Simpson said. “Kenya is now the fourth largest exporter of cut flowers in the world, behind the Netherlands, Colombia and Ecuador,” Simpson said.
When we pick up a bouquet of flowers, we often forget that these flowers come from the Global South, where workers endure long and tough working conditions, with relatively little pay, Simpson said.
“Often that labor goes unrecognized, and so it’s just important to keep that in mind,” Simpson said.
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