46 million flowers every day?
On day two of my bike packing flower tour around The Netherlands, I awoke at 5:30am and silently crept out of my top bunk at the hostel trying not to wake up the sweet German woman who had an interview for a PhD that afternoon. I was unsuccessful, but she kindly came and sat with me whilst I packed my things up into my bike packing bags, rolling them tight and stuffing them down as far as they would go. I set out into the quiet streets of Amsterdam on my bike, and began pedalling.
Aalsmeer flower market is no quaint flower market, the kind you might visit on the weekend surrounded by wonky produce, freshly harvested early that morning.
Aalsmeer is a 250-football-pitch-sized building complex, the world’s largest floral trading platform. It emerges suddenly after cycling for 18km through green meadowed spaces inbetween houses and flat blocks on the outskirts of Amsterdam, the oyster catchers and blackbirds call to one another and the roads and canals are soft and quiet as people slowly begin to emerge. A heron flies silently like an ancient beast out of the mist above a canal. Then out of nowhere, you’re suddenly cycling around an industrial complex and the sound of aeroplanes dominates the sound of birdsong.
Anyone can go to Aalsmeer, and if you want to see behind the curtain of the cut flower industry it is one to make time for. If you do go, please do message me and tell what you thought of it.
Let me tell you how it made me feel.
Like a cog in a wheel, one that was unfathomably large, one that I naively didn’t understand at all, one with such a startling vastness that to try to get your hands on it to tame it would be a lifetime’s work.
Dutch buckets stacked neatly with flowers from all over the world flew (in some cases literally) around the vast open industrial space, guided by people in high vis jackets on small carts, carrying long trains of trolleys of identical looking, straight-stemmed flowers. There was no human-ness here, everything felt mechanised and sterile, so hyper-industrial as to make the flowers appear like blocks of colourful Lego from a distance.
Some keys facts about Aalsmeer market:
The site is now as large as 250 football pitches, larger than Monaco
An average of 46 million flowers are sold every day, 5 days a week
Royal Flora Holland who run the market, do not export flowers, it’s the trading companies that do their purchasing here
Growers and traders do business directly. In doing so they make agreements about product quality packaging supply times etc
The auction is so large it would take a driver 45 mins to drive around it so they have a shuttle, it takes 10 minutes and is 18km long, it can carry 2600 trolleys per hour
The cold stores cover an area of 51,800m squared
There is often only 24 hours between harvesting by the grower and delivery in Europe, the maximum time between harvesting and delivery is 48 hours
They are washing 200,000 floral buckets a day in a special bucket washing facility
35% of flowers come from abroad
Some foliage travelling by ship take 52 days to arrive
To talk about the robotic nature of it all, despite so much of it being actually robotic or driven by tech and data, I feel as though I do the workers a huge disservice, dehumanising them entirely. It wasn’t them, but that space. Something about the scale of this place made for terrifying on-looking. The process of growing, to me, is so incredibly human, but the humanity felt absent here.
At either end of the floral production process are people. Those growing and tending to the crop, and at the end the florists or the consumer using them. It feels so pathetically sentimental to feel uncomfortable by this process of intense globalisation but I do, it left a sharp taste in my mouth. I left anxious.
When I emerged out of the artificially cold hall into the sunshine at 9am I knew I had to eat something, a couple of sad looking pecan pastries in my bag, lightly crumpled and flaking unceremoniously after being stuffed into the top of my backpack that morning. But the vision of last hour made me masticate that first pecan pastry slowly, and I found myself unable to swallow.
I sat in the shade outside, the intense heat only just beginning and starting to prickle my already sunburnt arms, whilst planes flew overhead, so loud and so low because Schiphol airport is behind Aalsmeer. It is the perfect most logical place for the World’s largest trading platform for cut flowers and potted plants, right next to the flights the flowers come in on. Flowers come in, and immediately go out again, most within 24 hours. I KNOW and understand the necessity for that from a business perspective, we’re talking about highly perishable goods, but christ something feels so disconcerting about that speed.
This is the definition of fast flowers.
But, I hear you say, they need to be right? The shorter the journey to the retailer, florist or wholesaler, the longer they last on the shelf or your kitchen table. And does it matter how soulless it is in that space? Isn’t that just the way of the world?
Maybe, but it felt a lot like fast fashion. A luxury product, flown around the world to be moved by robots alongside human hands, quickly, efficiently, only to see the bin 2-3 weeks later?
I hopped back on my bike then, keen to be away from Aalsmeer and frustrated with myself that I didn’t feel in awe of it all. My head buzzed so much that I had a small cry on the side of a canal, watching the kestrel fly over and a lazy bee hop from wildflower to wildflower in the deep meadow verge. I missed my dad who I usually do my bikepacking trips with, it felt odd not to talk it all through with someone who had experienced it alongside me.
I don’t have a conclusion that I’m comfortable with yet, but I am so glad I saw it because it provided the perfect backdrop for my next day’s adventure with Daan the exporter. A day where I visited another auction and felt totally different.
