Roses are red, violets are blue, yours probably flew through Miami airport

The roses you buy from a florist, supermarket or website this week for Valentine's Day most likely arrived in the United States through one place: Miami International Airport, the gateway for about 90 percent of the country's imported cut flowers.

All year round, farm workers cut flowers by hand, especially in Colombia and Ecuador, to be sent on cargo planes to Miami, where they are inspected and then loaded onto trucks to reach every state on the mainland. Sometimes flowers cut in the morning can be in South Florida by noon, a three or four hour flight away.

It's a logistical feat, especially in the weeks leading up to February 14 – one of the two most important holidays in the flower industry, along with Mother's Day. Yet few take this into account when they pick up bouquets for €20 at Target.

“If you ask the general consumer, 'Where do flowers come from?' they think they come from someone's backyard,” said Christine Boldt, executive vice president of the Association of Floral Importers of Florida, a trade group.

Colombian airline Avianca is doubling the number of daily cargo flights to Miami in the month leading up to Valentine's Day. Customs and Border Protection is bringing in additional agricultural specialists from other parts of the country to increase flower inspections. Industry executives lose sleep coordinating truck routes and solving problems.

Are you missing a shipment of roses? Bad luck. Demand plummets once the day is over, at least until Mother's Day.

“It's hard from a production perspective because you really have to increase production, bring it down, increase it again for Mother's Day, and then decrease it again,” says Carlos Oramas, co-founder and CEO of the Gems. Group, a flower importer based in Doral, west of Miami airport. “There is a lot of complexity in agriculture.”

Not to mention “many more planes, many more trucks and many more hours” than the industry demands at other times of the year, Mr. Oramas said. (Critics note that greenhouse gas emissions from air cargo flights harm the environment, and have urged consumers to seek out and buy American-grown flowers, a much smaller share of the market.)

Flower sales rose during the coronavirus pandemic as more people sent bouquets — “a gift that you don't have to deliver,” Ms. Boldt said — to loved ones they couldn't see in person. As pandemic restrictions eased, there was a shortage of flowers for a while as people made up for lost time and weddings and other festive events spiked.

“Now we're in a transition to figure out how much demand there is from consumers on a weekly basis,” Ms. Boldt said.

Overall, there is enough demand that South Florida's floral industry directly or indirectly employs about 6,000 people, her group estimates. In Colombia, the company employs about 200,000 people, formally or informally, said Javier Mesa of Asocolflores, the Colombian association of flower exporters. Valentine's Day may represent half of the year's sales for the country's farms, he said.

Preparations for the holiday start months in advance. From mid-January, the numbers of flower flights, inspectors and workers increase. Importers are ordering their Valentine's Day offerings, mostly bunches of boxed flowers for retail florists, who put together their own bouquets, and pre-arranged bouquets for grocery chains like Costco and Walmart, as well as e-commerce sites like 1-800-Flowers.

Despite all this, the perishable flowers must remain 'inactive' in cold temperatures, requiring refrigerated cargo planes, warehouses and trucks.

On Monday, workers unloaded 22 pallets of boxes of flowers from an Avianca Airbus 330 Freighter. In the warehouse, the floors were slippery from the cold cargo – so cold that there was no trace of their scent among the many thousands of flowers. Boxes of flowers were stacked in orderly piles, awaiting approval from Customs and Border Protection. White carnations with red tips. Bright sunflowers. Lavender hydrangeas.

“From the magical country of Colombia to the world,” read one shipment of boxes.

Agriculture specialists took samples from the shipments to look for diseases and hitchhiking pests, including beetles, locusts, wasps and moths. They took out bunches of flowers and shook them upside down on white paper. If anything suspicious came out, they examined it with a magnifying glass and flashlight.

From mid-January through the end of last week, specialists cleared more than 830 million stems from 75,000 sampled boxes and found about 1,100 pests, according to Daniel Alonso, Customs and Border Protection port director for Miami International Airport.

On Monday, a specialist, José Rodríguez, found a small pest, not much bigger than a speck of dirt, in a bunch of chrysanthemums. He placed it in a vial of alcohol to be sent to the U.S. Department of Agriculture for identification. The chrysanthemums would be suspended until the agency decided what action, if any, to take, such as fumigating the shipment, returning it to the farm or destroying it.

Several specialists said they enjoyed knowing they were making someone's day a little happier – a sentiment echoed by others in the industry.

“Each of these bouquets has a story,” said Mr. Oramas, the director. “To be able to be part of such an intimate moment in so many places across the country – it's a real blessing.”