Your mother always told you to stand up straight, keep your shoulders back, chin up and don’t slouch! She would be thrilled to see how we keep this same attitude with our flowers. It amazes me that we ship many of our flowers standing upright, and sometimes standing up in water. I decided to head down to the warehouse to learn what the process is.
The first word that got dropped on me was geotropism…geo-whaaaat?
Geotropism, also known as gravitropism, is the response of a plant part to the stimulus of gravity. Plant stems will grow upwards irrespective of the position in which they are placed, this phenomenon is actually "negative geotropism" as the tulip will grow against gravity. Roots show positive geotropism as they grow down, with gravity. So when we lay tulips down to ship them, they might lose the perfectly straight posture our growers have worked so hard to achieve. There is also
phototropism, which is a response based on the direction of the light source. We want to protect the integrity of that long elegant stem as long as we can, so the tulip doesn't bend in the vase when it is placed as the center piece of your room.
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| Kept in a dark room, over the course of 14 hours this tulip illustrates "negative geotropism." |
Tulips and Snapdragons are the most geotropic flowers we grow. And our
soil grown tulips, which are prized for their stem thickness and length, can really bend dramatically while packed in a flat box. Irises have some geotropic qualities, and lilies aren’t geotropic. The majority of Sun Valley’s customers have their tulips and iris packed upright.
On the day I chatted with the upright pack team, they were in the middle of doing a lily wet pack. The "wet pack" keeps your flowers as fresh as possible, since they ship while sitting in life-giving water. Now this gets pretty wild, big carts of
lilies are wheeled in from the coolers. The team sets up plastic bags, then places black buckets inside each bag, the buckets have about 2 or 3 inches of water in each. The conveyor belt moves forward in short bursts while team members fill the buckets with bunches of
California Grown lilies.
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| The lily wet pack line in action. |
This is some hard work as the lilies are pretty unwieldy, so the crew really has to struggle to get the lilies in the buckets and bagged up, then the conveyor belt slides them down to the boxing area. Here the boxes get formed, and the lilies are inserted for a perfect snug fit. Next packaging tape is wrapped around the box, and it shoots through into the shipping area. The boxes are set upright on pallets, and away they go, with plenty of water for their journey. Speaking with team leader Douglas Miller, he says, “Customers are finding the upright pack is better than a flat pack, we are seeing more and more orders going upright than ever before.” We have also started packing our
freesia in wet packs since it keeps the flower vitality and increases vase life.
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| Team Member Michael, dropping wet packed lilies into a box. |
Iris like to be shipped upright as well. They go into a special box which is resistant to moisture, but they don’t ship with standing water. Producing boxes at Sun Valley is actually a full time job for 2 or 3 people. Seeing these specialized boxes on the packing line, I decided to head upstairs in the warehouse, where Danial, John and Nick are making boxes on a huge level. Daniel was making hamper dividers for iris on this really cool foot operated stapling machine. He can turn out about 500-600 boxes per hour on this machine. Watching him work you see a deep level of concentration, as he assembles the various components of our shipping materials.
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| Danial making "hamper dividers" for shipping iris. |
The same team that runs the tulip and lily wet pack line, will shift over to the iris line depending on the work flow. This crew is usually blasting classic rock and wearing t-shirts in the chilly refrigerated air. It is astonishing how many boxes they can ship in a short period of time. This time of year the line will run for about 4 to 5 hours. However, around Valentines Day they will be shipping 8,000 boxes of tulips every 24 hours!
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| Buckets of Iris on carts, then getting packaged. |
The upright packing line is a great combination of team work, technology and innovation. This helps Sun Valley stay true to our mission, which is to create the best floral experience through operational excellence.
