Bouquets
Royal Flowers was established in 1991 and have been selling straight bunches of roses to the US market for years and decided to offer pre-made bouquets three years ago. "Some US supermarkets require bouquets. So in order to stay competitive, we decided to offer this service too", says Sanchez. The bouquets are created by designers and their customers and are put together at their farm in Ecuador and from there on shipped into the USA. "We started off with offering bouquets that consisted of our own grown roses that were complemented with imported flowers." The amount of imported flowers, however, decreased sharply when they decided to grow their own summer flowers in Ecuador, about 1.5 years later.
Summer flowers
Royal Flowers is growing roses at two large farms in Ecuador, with a total acreage of approximately 103 hectares under greenhouses. But Royal Flowers owns two more locations. These are, however, not suitable for rose cultivation as they are based on a lower altitude and have a warmer climate. As the pre-made bouquets were well received by the US market, they saw the opportunity to use these lower altitude locations to expand their range of flower varieties they offer. So, they firstly started to trial and grow hydrangeas two years ago and decided to experiment with more summer flowers about 1,5 years ago. "We visited many flower shows, spoke to several breeders and trialed different varieties to find out what would grow well and not", says Monica Cernadas, Director Procurement and inventory management.
This location seems to be well-suited for a large variety of summer flowers. "We always want to offer something unusual or make an existing variety special. And this location enables us to do so. A regular lavender stem, for example, is about 35-40 cm and we can grow them up to 60-65 cm. And the same counts for the well-known Green Ball which usually reaches a stem length of 36cm, but at this location we can grow them up to 120 cm." Currently, their assortment consists of about 40 varieties and they are still trialing new varieties. "We have still room for growth. Currently, only 13ha of this in total 42 ha land in Santa Domingo, situated at an altitude of 327 meters above sea level, is used for hydrangea and summer flower production."
Currently, the majority of the flowers that are used in the bouquets are 'home-grown'. To complement what is grown on their own farms with carefully selected flowers from Colombia, Costa Rica, Peru, Thailand, Africa and Holland.
Challenges
The reactions on the summer flowers and bouquets are very positive, but there are always some challenges to deal with. "Colombian flowers are cheaper to grow and they do not have to pay tax on roses. Therefore, we try to be a bit different and offer fresher products. Besides that, it is always a challenge to import all the flowers that you want. The bouquets are made out of Ecuador and not all products are allowed to be imported into Ecuador. For example the Pompon is difficult to grow in Ecuador and cannot be imported from Colombia. So, we cannot use this flower in our bouquets and we have to search for good alternatives", says Sanchez.
New varieties
Royal Flowers is always looking for new varieties to introduce. "This summer, we will introduce 10 new rose varieties, including some new garden and spray rose varieties. We continue with trialing summer varieties and we have two exclusive products in the pipeline that we have not seen anywhere else", says Cernadas.
For more information
Royal Flowers+1.305.477.4483
Email: info@royalflowersgroup.com
www.royalflowersgroup.com