Flower Power: Can standards bring order to the chaotic flower market?
The case for collaboration
The Hortiwise study attributes Jomo Kenyatta airport’s ascent to the top of the African cargo airport hierarchy in 2011 largely to the rise in flower traffic, but notes that this growth has put increasing pressure on supply chains and margins. Getting to the top is, to a large extent, beyond the capabilities of individual operators. The Hortiwise study emphasized the need for cooperation and stressed that many of the inefficiencies it identified in the supply chain from Kenya to Holland were due to a lack of communication and coordination between key actors.
In some cases, solutions to individual cold-chain issues are making an overall improvement more difficult. Hortiwise found a patchwork of established stopgaps and workarounds to cope with issues and inefficiencies, such as the need to re-cool flowers at airports through inefficient and costly measures. The authors concluded that a lack of standards and protocols was hampering a strategic approach.
Harry van der Plas vividly remembers his first visit to the airport in 2007 after he had taken over Netherlands- and Kenya-based forwarder, Total Touch Cargo, which specializes in perishables, primarily flowers. “You always had to drive your perishables with dollies over the road to the aircraft,” he said. The coldroom-to-aircraft time was more than two hours.
Like the other forwarders at the time, Total Touch had a facility off airport, but van der Plas wanted to be online, with direct ramp access and cooling facilities. So, he approached Kenya Airways with a proposal to establish a joint-venture handling company, which led to the creation of perishable cargo handling firm Triple FFF, which has two cold rooms located airside and capable of storing about 100
main deck pallets or 6,300 tons of perishable cargo in a mix of commodities. “The cool chain becomes more important because mass market retailers, who control more and more of sales, want clear and transparent processes,” he said.
Maintaining the right temperature is critical, stressed Gerjan Telleman, owner and CEO of Fresco Flowers, a packing company located at the Aalsmeer Flower Auction. Aalsmeer represents eight flower farms in Kenya and one in Ethiopia, among them some of Africa’s biggest rose growers. Telleman is also a believer in th eimportance of the cold chain. “Because we work with growers that are far apart, it is important that the cold chain is in control.”
How important? Total Touch’s van der Plas said a shipment of roses that takes off from Nairobi at a temperature between three and four degrees will experience a build-up of one degree per hour enroute, which means the ambient temperature will be between 12 and 15 degrees C at arrival in Amsterdam. However, if the temperature at take-off is between six and eight degrees, it will go up by 1.5 to two degrees in an hour.
This is why “you need to build pallets as late as possible,” van der Plas said. “Otherwise it becomes a compost bin. Outside temperatures in Kenya go up to 40 degrees Celsius.” The high volume of traffic, especially at peak times, requires that flowers are taken to the aircraft early, unless you are located airside, like TripleFFF. Further heat build-up was caused by slow (four boxes per minute) screening at the airport, with long qeues of trucks waiting to be offloaded as a result. Triple FFF brought in three fast hybrid scanners that can screen 60 boxes of flowers in a minute each.
At the same time, van der Plas said it was important to go for robust manpower-based solutions rather than high-tech options that were more vulnerable to power outages – using rollerbeds instead of fully automated facilities, for example. These measures, he said, produced tangible results. Air France-KLM-Martinair Cargo registered a drop of 2 degrees C in average arrival temperature of shipments at Amsterdam after it started working with Triple FFF, he reported.
Panalpina’s Archer said his company has take the high-tech approach, using vacuum-cooling technology to ensure that flowers start their journey at the right temperature. This has resulted in a drop of three degrees in temperature when they arrive in Amsterdam, reported Archer.
Likewise, every one of Fresco’s shipments is equipped with a data logger, which is checked on arrival in Holland and fed into the company’s ERP system. “Temperature monitoring in itself is not an answer to high-quality roses or a longer vase life,” Telleman said. “It is only a tool to alert the supply chain on problem areas that need attention.”
One grower pointed out that high temperatures are not the only source of quality problems, mentioning bent stems and the infection of flowers with botrytis spores, which can develop faster higher temperatures.
Two challenges that have only grown since the Hortiwise study was completed are the pressure on the supply chain from the build-up in traffic volume and the changing dynamics brought about by the rise of mass market retailers in Europe. Total Touch’s van der Plas said, “you can create a lot of efficiency if you standardize packaging.” By his estimate, there are close to 100 different types of boxes in use today. Also reducing the use of tractor-and-dolly transports from offline locations would contribute to a better product. “Tractors are blasting diesel particles in flower and vegetable boxes,” he added. “That’s not what the customer wants.”
Mass-market retailers, who bypass the Aalsmeer auction, are adding to the squeeze on margins and provide fresh challenges for cold chain management, largely through temperature issues and ethylene production stemming from mixing flower shipments with other types of perishables.
Panalpina is responding to the challenge posed by mass market retailers by increasing the size of its cold-room space at Nairobi from the current 2,800 square meters to 4,000. A major reason for this is that with the rise of large retailers, jobs like packing flowers in supermarket sleeves and labelling them are increasingly shifting to the origin country.
