The flowers in your living room may have crossed thousands of miles before reaching the vase and they smell as fresh as just being harvested. The credit goes to the logistics “cold chain” that is ensuring quick and efficient transportation to preserve the freshness of flowers.
Be it the Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day or any special occasion, flowers are undoubtedly one of the most traded produce globally. Quintessential to any celebration, flowers are of great importance and are integral to the human society. The cut flower industry, therefore, has been flourishing rapidly and widely, mainly on the back of air freight industry that has been instrumental in providing quick and efficient transportation to over 95 percent of the exported cut flowers. As an efficient support system, the air cargo industry ensures they have more than enough capacity to handle the constant flow of the delicate cargo as eighty to ninety percent of purchases are shipped within 24 hours.
Packing fresh flowers for transport
With the snip of a stem – the clock starts ticking for growers who hydrate and place flowers quickly in coolers on site. Using special techniques, the flowers are then packed for transportation. The most common packaging is boxes in which the flowers are placed horizontally. Other flowers, which cannot survive for long without water, are packed with their stems in water containers or buckets. Carefully loaded onto pallets, refrigerated trucks bring them to airports where they are loaded onto cargo planes.
Global trade flow of flowers
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