Next Gen LIVE! attendees toured the cargo facility run by JA Flowers at Miami International Airport. The facility receives about three planes per day, each of which can carry as many as 14,000 boxes of flowers.
An employee at USA Bouquet in Miami places roses on a conveyor belt. It takes a minute and a half to make up to 32 bouquets.
Before an imported flower makes it into the hands of a U.S. florist, it goes through a swift and streamlined supply chain that strives to protect the integrity of the flower by keeping it in the cold chain.
On Tuesday, more than 100 of the 160 attendees of the Society of American Florists’ Next Gen LIVE! event in Miami got an inside look at the processes and infrastructure that last year handled 6.5 billion stems of imported flowers. The group toured an importing facility at the Miami International Airport, the loading docks at a floral trucking company, and a bouquet maker. (Click here to see more pictures of the tour.)
Airport Facilities
When flowers touch down at the Miami International Airport, their first stop is a cargo facility. One of those, Sky Lease Cargo, is a 130,000 square-foot warehouse situated on the edge of the runway among other cargo facilities.
Sky Lease Cargo receives three planes per day (and up to 10 planes per day leading up to floral holidays), each of which can hold up to 14,000 half boxes of flowers from up to 150 different farms, said Derek Dusharm, vice president of JA Flowers, which operates from the facility.
The expansive warehouse has several bays facing the runway from which it receives boxes of flowers stacked on metal skids. It takes less than two minutes to unload a skid and get it out of the hot Florida sun and into the warehouse, which is cooled to 34 to 38 degrees. Once inside, the skids are placed on a platform that lowers eight feet into the ground, enabling some of the 325 employees to easily begin removing the boxes on top.
Not every box is inspected. U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents request a small number of boxes to inspect based on the types of flowers, their risk level for pests and disease, country of origin and farm. In a well-lit room, the agents bang the flowers against a table lined with white paper, which makes it easy to spot pests falling out of the blooms.
If pests or diseases are found, a sample is taken to USDA for identification. If it is determined that the pest or disease needs eradicated, that crop is sent to another building to be fumigated or incinerated.
If the flowers are pest and disease free, they are cleared to be picked up by an importer or transportation company, which load the flowers into refrigerated trucks to get them to their chilled warehouses where they are sorted for distribution.
Distribution
At Armellini Logistics, just a few miles west of Sky Lease Cargo, refrigerated trucks with boxes of flowers dock at bays. Inside the cold warehouse, a crew bundled in winter jackets unloads pallets of boxed flowers. They scan every box on the pallet, and then sort the boxes by route and customer. The boxes are restacked onto pallets and loaded into trucks that fan out throughout the country.
Armellini is one of about 25 floral truck lines in Miami. They receive 210,000 boxes of flowers a week and make 1,200 deliveries to their customers throughout the country, says company President David Armellini.
Bouquet Maker
Some of the flowers stay in Miami, where they are made into bouquets for mass markets and wire services.
At USA Bouquet Next Gen attendees watched as workers positioned at stations alongside a conveyor belt placed chrysanthemums, roses, leather leaf ferns, gerbera daisies into bouquets. Within a minute and a half, the team can assemble 32 bouquets. That adds up to about 8,000 to 9,000 cases of bouquets a day, a USA Bouquet representative said.
Danny Sanchez, a Next Gen Live attendee and founder and CEO of South Florals Group in Miami, said it was seeing that volume a few years ago at a bouquet maker for 1-800-FLOWERS.COM that helped him see that he needed to take his business online.
“It was seeing things like that really made me change my game,” he said. “I think it is really important for a retail florist to see.”
Expedited Service
The importing process has become more efficient over the years, in part thanks to the Association of Floral Importers of Florida (AFIF), which works with the airlines and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to streamline the process. Those efforts have largely included reducing the number of inspections so product is released from Customs and Border Protection more quickly, said AFIF Executive Director Christine Boldt, who led the tour.
“We are like a well-oiled machine,” she said. “We are constantly moving parts. We are constantly going forward. People don’t realize that Miami does work 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
It can take just a few hours from the time the flowers touch down at the airport until they start their road trip across the country, Boldt said.
“Why are 90 percent of flowers coming in through Miami? Because we can get them through inspection quicker and on the roads to customers faster,” she said. “If you bring flowers through an airport that’s closed, the product waits. Inspections are delayed. We can get this stuff cleared on the trucks and on the road and to the west coast sometimes faster than if it were cleared on the west coast.”
Amanda Jedlinsky is the managing editor of SAF NOW.