USA TODAY International Edition
Bouquets take long trip from farm to Mom
Airlines play critical role in keeping flowers fresh
Mother’s Day is around the corner and, according the National Retail Federation, this year American consumers will honor their moms with gifts of special outings, spa visits, meals, jewelry, electronics, greeting cards and $2.6 billion worth of flowers.
Many of the carnations, roses and bouquets moms are showered with will hail from farms around Bogota, Colombia. The high-altitude, temperate region ranks as one of the world’s largest exporters of cut flowers, and each day there’s a tightly choreographed race to get millions of freshly harvested flowers to the airport and onto planes for delivery to customers around the world.
I joined a team from United Airlines to see how roses make their way from one farm near Bogota to Houston and, possibly, to you.
Freshly cut on the farm
At Jaroma Roses, 79 acres of greenhouses produce more than 30 million roses each year in colors from white and pink to green and red with dozens of shades in between and with names such as Moody Blues, High & Twinkle, Freedom, Lemonade, Showgirl and Hot Merengue.
“There are more than 2,000 different kinds of roses,” company president and owner Jaime Rodriguez told me at the start of a several-hour farm tour, “Here we produce about 50 different kinds. The best sellers are always the red ones, but breeders are always creating new combinations and unusual colors.”
This week is peak shipping time for Mother’s Day, and teams of Jaroma Roses’ more than 600 workers are in the greenhouses each day cutting flowers by 6 a.m. From the greenhouses, freshly cut roses are gathered by color and taken by cart, or by the farm’s new ski lift-like conveyor system, to workers along long tables in a large cooled room. There, the flowers are measured, cut, graded and bundled into corrugated paper sleeves. The sleeves then move into chilled storerooms where the temperature is set between 37 and 41 degrees Fahrenheit. This keeps them as fresh as possible before they’re loaded onto refrigerated trucks that head out for Bogota’s El Dorado International Airport, more than an hour away.
Like other farms, Jaroma Roses sells its flowers F.O.B., which stands for “free on board” (or “freight on board”) and means the buyer is responsible for arranging and paying the costs of shipment once the boxed flowers are delivered to the airport. “The customer chooses the freight company,” Rodriguez said. “If we have a new customer who has not imported before, we recommend a company, but the customers deal directly with the cargo agency.”
The agencies, in turn, choose which airline they’ll use to ship the flowers onward to their destinations in the U.S., Asia, Europe, Russia and elsewhere. From Bogota and many other cities, there are multiple choices of carriers.
Headed to the U.S.
United Airlines, which a major freight agency has been using to ship Jaroma Roses to Houston and on to Japan, has room in the cargo holds of three commercial flights from Bogota each day: two 737s (one heading to Houston; the other to Newark) that can accommodate less than 1 ton of cargo and a 757 to Houston that could have room for as much as 3 tons of cargo.
In United’s cargo area at Bogota airport, the temperatures were cool as the flowers I saw headed for Houston were moved from the refrigerated trucks to machines that scan and weigh each box. The boxes then were loaded onto pallets, weighed again and then sent into the cargo hold on the plane, where temperatures for the flowers were set at a cool 50 degrees during the flight.
In Houston, United works closely with the perishable cargo handler dnata USA Cargo to transfer the flowers between flights or to local customers.
“Customs sometimes meets and inspects the flowers right when they come off the plane,” said Tom Hood, general manager of dnata cargo in Houston. “Other times they inspect a shipment once we have it here inside.” Agents from the U.S. Department of Agriculture also come by for spot checks, he said.
Finally off the plane
Once off the plane, the pallets of flowers are moved to dnata’s cooled storage warehouse and then, as quickly as possible, into an even colder “precooling” room. There, the small round flaps I had noticed cut into each end of the boxes in Bogota were opened, and any warm air that may had built up inside the box during the flight essentially is sucked out and replaced by the much colder air in the room.
The pre-cooling process helps perk up and reanimate the flowers and prepares them for the next step of their journey, which may be U.S. florists readying for the Mother’s Day onslaught. Others will end up on a flight to Japan or Russia, where the premium roses like those I’d seen snipped, bundled and boxed for shipment a day earlier in Colombia might end up being sold for upward of $50 a stem.