The Green Room

Creative thinking about roses takes hundreds of trucks off the road

By Deb Zoellick on February 14, 2012 Leave a comment

Roses are like the prima donnas of flowers. They demand special treatment that most other flowers don’t need. They require a very sharp blade for a clean cut, or else they won’t absorb water. And more than other flowers, they can’t withstand bacteria, so sanitization is important. It’s fair to say you have to work a little harder to make roses happy.

Because the rose is fairly particular about the way it likes to be treated, we’ve always had them cut in Miami using professional flower cutters who use extremely sharp blades. Then we drop them in buckets of water and ship them to the clubs.

That’s the way we handled all of our flowers until 2008, when we began dry-packing most flowers and having the clubs cut them onsite. We didn’t have to pay to ship the flowers and the extra weight of the water they were packed in, and we could pack more flowers on a truck. That change alone significantly reduced the full truckloads of flowers shipped a year – from 849 to 419 truckloads – and improved profitability by $12 million.

Lilies, daisies, carnations and others – they all fared well with the change. But we knew better than to touch the roses back then. The cutting tools we had in the clubs would damage the flowers, shortening their shelf life.

We continued to look for a more environmentally friendly solution for shipping and cutting roses, and last year we ran across one that met our requirements. A professional flower cutter in New Jersey had made a smaller version of the cutting machine used in Miami that could be used in our clubs, allowing us to dry-pack the roses for shipping. The machine cuts the roses and sanitizes the sharp blade at the same time.

The new machines were piloted in the 38 clubs served out of Paul’s Valley Oklahoma Distribution Center. The feedback was terrific. Not only did they work well on roses, they worked great on all flowers.

We hope to roll out the new machines in 475 more clubs over the next two years. It will mean fewer trucks on the road – taking the annual truckload count down from 419 to 224 – and a further improvement in profitability.

We believe sustainability is not just good for the environment, it is also good for the bottomline. You really can be a successful business and address pressing social issues at the same time.