The world's largest central-trade building in Aalsmeer is the site of a major Bloemenveiling - flower auction. 7000 growers deliver cut flowers and plants in the evening. As products arrive, experts rate the flowers for auction the following morning. The flowers are traded by Dutch auction where the price starts high and is sold to the first person willing to pay the price. The auction sales are per stem of cut flower. The entire auction happens at lightning speed - 300 transactions per second. It is high-tech with electronic auction clocks and buyers with laptops. Everyday over 21 million flowers and plants of 11,000 varieties are traded. It is hard to imagine those numbers. On average, 6 million Euros are exchanged daily in Aalsmeer. That's big business - $1.5B Euros annually. By far, Germany is the largest recipient of the Holland-exported flowers and plants. The top 5 cut flowers sold at Aalsmeer are: rose (1.6B stems annually), tulip (540M), chrysanthemum (450M), gerbera daisy (290M), lily (160M)
We're not sure how all the transactions work (the speed of them) because we missed the actual auction by 2 minutes. When we arrived, we went in the first door we saw and ended up on the warehouse floor. Later we discovered touristen were verboden where we were - oops. We were a little conspicous with our camera and two kids on a stroller. We asked a gentelmen grabbing a bite at the fish vendor where the auction was, and he said we had just missed it. Yet, there was still a flurry of activity to see managing the sales of the day. So we joined the other tourists up on the observation deck. The auction hall had a few stragglers working on their laptops. Next time, we need to get here earlier when it opens to visitors - 8 or 8:30. The auction probably started even earlier in the morning.
The warehouse floor was like a busy beehive. Orange and red engines - like a small forklift or golf cart - pull the lines of flower carts around the floor. The sellers deliver their goods (plants or bunches of stems) to the buyers carts located at numbered stations. Once full, the buyers line of carts is taken to the freight area to be delivered all over the world. Some of the flowers were boxed up for air shipment. All is managed by a bar code system. Aalsmeer also had an impressive conveyor system (32 km worth) for moving the carts of flowers. The boys really loved watching the red conveyors moving along the tracks - clicking and rattling by us up at our level.
posted by Whitney @ 3:53 AM
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