Photos for now, text to come later, but basically a "busman's holiday" for an auction geek... world's largest daily auction of perishable flowers. Hybrid of auction and commodity trading floor, fronting a mega-organized warehousing and distribution system where the stock rotates 365x / year.
And finally after 4 days some "later text", giving a sense of the scope of this operation. To believe it you really have to see it, but here are the basics.
The "FloraHolland" operation is located adjacent to Schiphol airport, one of the worlds largest.
This enables both the import of fresh flowers for daily sale, and the immediate export of sold flowers.
FloraHolland does more than 100K transactions / day, with an average daily value of 9.6M Euro.
35M flowers sold / day.
3.7B roses sold / year, 1.7B tulips, then a bunch of flowers whose names I can't recognize.
3739 direct employees; 250K full time jobs including both direct and indirect employment.
4700 flower seller members (4100 in the Netherlands, 600 located in other countries).
Ranks with the seaport of Rotterdam and the airport of Schiphol as one of Netherlands top 3 'mainports'.
Awesome that you went!
ReplyDeleteLook forward hearing more about your experiences.
It was a really fun field trip and an amazing operation. Having a wonderful time here, thank you for all your advice!
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