The most important sales occasions for the cut flower industry are on the horizon – Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day.
At New Covent Garden Market, home to the UK’s largest wholesale cut flower market, business development manager Helen Evans is gearing up for the approaching season. She says the major trend for this year is “very much more informal, looser style [flowers] which suits more traditional summer varieties. Old is the new new,” she explains, with “traditional, cottage garden-style flowers suiting the trend to more informal styles.” She cites www.rosebiemorton.com and florists like www.jayarcherfloraldesign.com as good examples of current trends.
Mother’s Day is a bigger sales occasion than Valentine’s Day, explains Evans. “Valentine’s is not big for British [people, compared to some other countries] and demand is getting later and later.” This year, this is compounded by the fact 14 February falls on a Sunday, meaning florists will lose passing trade from office workers and commuters. However, Mother’s Day is relatively early this year on 6 March and “is always good for sales,” says Evans.
British Flowers Week has also proved an excellent initiative for generating extra sales, according to Evans. Held for the fifth time last June, the week is building with more florists getting on board, offering promotions, workshops, talks and demonstrations to raise the profile of the cut flower industry and tempt new consumers into shops. “One wholesaler likened it to another Mother’s Day,” says Evans. It will be held for the sixth time in June 2016.
The UK cut flower industry is one of the largest in Europe, according to market analysts IBISWorld, with revenues of £1.2 billion and profits of £133 million. The outlook for growth is positive, claims IBISWorld, which is forecasting compound annual growth rate of 2.5 per cent in the period 2016-21, up from two per cent in the period 2011-16.
There are no major players in this industry, the report points out, although it is estimated by Lyndon Mason, who oversees the AHDB-funded Cut Flower Research Centre in the growing heartland of Lincolnshire, that supermarkets control around 70 per cent of the retail market, with wholesalers and independent florists taking the bulk of the remaining 30 per cent.
Although there is no firm data, best estimates suggest just 10 per cent of flowers sold in the UK are grown here, according to Evans, with the majority imported from Holland, Colombia and Kenya. Because the supermarket supply chain is a harsh system, UK growers that supply them focus on blooms that are robust, reliable and are available at the right price to meet retail buyers’ budgets, hence the continuing popularity of daffodils, tulips, sunflowers, stocks, lilies and ornamental brassicas.
The biggest growers will produce around 30 to 40 acres in glasshouses and the biggest outdoor growers will have hundreds of acres, explains Mason. Stocks are exclusively grown indoors and most forced tulips and lilies are also grown indoors. Sweet Williams are grown outdoors, as well as hardy foliage, sunflowers and daffodils. Indeed, the warm December of 2015 has meant the daffodil crop has been very early and there is some being harvested now, causing some problems for growers who will need to find a market for their crops far earlier than usual.
Although there is growing consumer demand for locally sourced flowers and plants, and an increasing interest in the provenance of goods, IBISWorld points out that “the influence of leading supermarkets is expected to grow and exert downward pressure on industry profit margins. Import penetration is likely to strengthen, particularly in the cut flower segment.”
At the Cut Flower Project, based on a farm at Holbeach St Johns, Mason explains how his team are working on research aimed at helping UK flower growers. “We do two things – we develop new product lines and varieties to sell in the future and we solve actual problems the industry faces now,” he says.
“One issue we’ve been looking at is an important herbicide, Ronstar, which is no longer available, and that has left a big hole for growers when it comes to weed control. So we have been looking into alternatives to Ronstar and although I am not prepared to say we have anything concrete, we are seeing some encouraging alternatives in the pipeline that will need a little tweaking.
“Ronstar has not been banned but the registration only lasts so long and when it has to be re-registered manufacturers sometimes decide it isn’t economically worthwhile to spend the money doing that so they get discontinued even if they are safe products,” Mason explains.
The Cut Flower Project’s other aim is to develop new products because growers are under a lot of price pressure and it is not always their top priority to develop them themselves. As Mason points out, growers’ primary concerns are the unfavourable exchange rate, which allows imports to come in very cheaply, and the introduction of the Living Wage. “Those are two factors we as a research centre have no impact on,” Mason points out, but it does aim to develop new products that could make the running of their businesses more profitable.
“We have seen some encouraging developments on hardy foliage,” says Mason, “and we are doing some trials on natural season Alstroemeria or Peruvian lily, which is normally grown in glasshouses, but we are investigating developing a natural spring-summer outdoor season with traditional older varieties.
“We are also doing work with ornamental brassicas which you often see in supermarket bouquets and we are trialling new varieties of Trachelium, a Mediterranean blue purple flower, which are good marketable crops.”
Other trials have been less successful. Although some crops have performed well, “we are struggling to get anything new in the shops because they prefer the tried and tested varieties and the supermarkets don’t want to take the economic risk. We grew Tilia – a beautiful flower but it couldn’t pass through the supermarket chain so it is only suitable for independent local florists.”
Looking forward to the rest of 2016, New Covent Garden Market will be exhibiting at the Chelsea Flower Show for the first time with the theme ‘Behind Every Great Florist’ and according to Evans, British Flowers Week in June is set to be bigger than ever, giving everyone in the industry something to look forward to.
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