The Global Flower Trade: Inside the World's Largest Flower Auction

In the lead up to Valentine’s Day on February 14, Americans alone will spend roughly $3.1 billion on flowers, the equivalent of the GDP of Bhutan. International totals, while unavailable, are likely much higher as Valentine’s Day is the only flower-centric holiday celebrated on the same day worldwide.

Over half of flowers purchased globally are traded in the lakeside town of Aalsmeer, Netherlands, home to Royal FloraHolland’s Aalsmeer Flower Auction, the oldest and largest place where flowers and plants are traded anywhere in the world. The auction averages 90 billion cut stems a year, which amounts to about 11 flowers for every living person.

The scale of the place is almost impossible to describe. The entire Principality of Monaco could fit inside of it. Employees use bikes to get from one side to the other. “If Amazon is the defining logistics machine of the modern economy,” says May Truong, an expert on global floriculture chains and market designs at IE University in Madrid, “then Royal FloraHolland’s Aalsmeer auction is its high-speed trading floor for flowers.”

Inside refrigerated storage rooms, rows and rows of cut flowers are organized by variety—evoking the self-serve warehouse at the end of a trip through IKEA, if instead of boxes of unassembled furniture you were looking at trolley after trolley of white Kenyan roses, purple and yellow tulips, multilayered ranunculus and nearly 23,000 other varieties of plants. An 11-mile track shuttles flowers throughout the facility on carts, called Danish trolleys, specially designed to carry buckets of cut stems and plants. According to recent company data, there are enough of these trolleys, about 260,000, to stretch across most of the Netherlands. Flowers are also pulled behind one of 290 red electric scooters that look like a hybrid version of a Segway and a tiny tractor.

You might think a giant building full of flowers would smell, well, really nicely of flowers. But according to Luus Hooyman, an auctioneer with the company for 20 years, it doesn’t really smell like that at all. This is largely because the flowers aren’t fully in bloom. Even the lilies don’t have much of a smell until they’ve opened, Hooyman explains. Over the years, the auction also stopped carrying as many fragrant flowers, finding that flowers with a smell don’t last as long.

The flowers traded at the Aalsmeer auction arrive every day between 1 p.m. and 4 a.m. by truck from local growers in the Netherlands or by plane from Africa, South America, and other parts of Europe. The Aalsmeer auction is a cooperative, with 3,000 growers sharing ownership, most based in the Netherlands. Every flower belongs to the grower until it’s sold. On any given day, 20 million flowers are traded over the auction clock by 2,200 buyers, the largest of which are often Dutch export companies who distribute them all over the world.

The auction begins every weekday at 6 a.m. In what’s known as the Dutch system, bids start high and get progressively smaller as buyers try to walk the line between not paying too much and losing out on the highest quality flowers. It’s mostly worked this way since the auction was founded in 1911. The auctioneers are responsible for recommending the flowers on auction, setting the price, and running the clock, which displays the descending number, the lowest minimum, and the price at which the product was ultimately purchased. The auctioneer runs the clock as many times as it takes to sell everything. They have to know the market, think fast, and as Hooyman explains, they have to know everything about flowers in order to sell each one for the best price. “Prices discovered there ripple outward to supermarkets in Germany, florists in Paris, and wedding planners in New York,” says Truong. Next to the clock, buyers also see information about the supplier, certifications for meeting environmental criteria, and a quality index, as well as other information like the trolley number for locating the product within the facility.

Aalsmeer was the first auction to use a countdown clock. For most of the 20th century, bidders sat in rows of stadium seats, facing the giant clock while trolleys of flowers were rolled out in front of them for inspection. It was competitive and exciting with prices going up and down like a vintage stock exchange. Buyers would push a button to stop the clock and the process would continue.

The Dutch auction clock has since come to be one of the more influential trading mechanisms in global agriculture, Truong says, with the same system being used for flower and vegetable trading in Japan and Brazil, coffee trading in India, and fish in Norway. But the system is changing. In the 1990s the clock was replaced with a digital version, and by 2017 the auction created a digital platform for buyers to participate remotely. Now people can buy flowers from anywhere in the world. The organizers also added a presale channel where flowers are offered at a fixed price before the auction.

The auction stops when everything is sold, which usually takes just a few hours. Roses are always popular—making up about 28 percent of all sales—but in the two weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day an auctioneer might sell three million roses every day. Red is obviously the most popular color. It’s the classic, “I love you,” rose. Michael Marriott, one of the world’s leading rosarians, explains that the most important quality that buyers are looking for in a cut rose versus a garden rose isn’t necessarily the type or look, it’s that it lasts a long time in a vase.

When the auction is over, the flowers are moved to the other side of the building and loaded back onto trucks and planes for distribution. “What makes Aalsmeer extraordinary isn’t just its size, it’s the precision,” says Truong. “Fresh flowers begin deteriorating the moment they’re cut, which means the cold chain cannot break, flights cannot be missed, and holiday surges cannot overwhelm the system. In logistical intensity it rivals any fulfillment network.”

Hooyman agrees. “It is still amazing that in the morning the flowers are at the auction clock and the next day in the shop in Milan, Paris, London, or a few days later in New York,” she says.

In some ways, the hold that the auction has on the flower market is evolving. The U.S. flower market for instance is much more decentralized, with 60 percent of imports coming from Colombia, according to the Society of American Florists. Still trading floors like Aalsmeer remain in almost continuous motion. As Truong put it, “behind every Valentine’s bouquet or arrangement lies one of the most precisely choreographed agricultural supply chains on Earth.”