Bloemenveiling Aalsmeer

Billing itself as the “global marketplace for flowers and plants”, the daily Bloemenveiling (flower auction) at FloraHolland is truly something to see. That’s just what we did early on Friday morning. (“Early” being the operative word. The auction begins in the wee hours so distributors can take possession and get the flowers to their final destinations as soon as possible.)

Waiting for distribution

Located in Aaalsmeer, south of Amsterdam, the Bloemenveiling has become a tourist destination, but

long before that it established itself as the largest flower auction in the world. Every day flowers arrive from all over including Kenya, Ethiopia, Israel, Ecuador, Germany, and, of course, the Netherlands; and every day some 20,000 varieties of plants are sold at auction and exported to world-wide destinations. (The FloraHolland website lists the following top five destinations: Germany, Great Britain, Italy, France and Russia. Germany made both lists? Seems odd!)

Let the bidding begin!

It moves fast...real fast!

I’ve seen the operation and I’m not sure I believe it! Under the fourth largest (by floor space) building in the world (10,600,000 square feet; 243 acres!) literally millions of flowers are delivered (a seemingly endless convoy of tractor-trailers), graded (30 separate inspections), packed on to multi-tiered palettes, and attached to a monorail. The endless stream of palettes wend their way in front of one of two auditoriums of hundreds of bidders who have literally seconds to decide and bid. Quickly tagged by auction employees, palettes are detached from the monorail and quickly retrieved by employees using electric trolleys and taken to designated areas (depending on the distributor) throughout the warehouse. From there, rows of similar varieties of flowers are arranged, and when a full caravan is collected, the palettes are attached to one another, and larger fork-lifts are used to pull the loads to waiting trucks on the premises. In what appears to be an incredibly complex process, the math is fairly simple, by virtue of the volume—(deliver, grade, auction, take possession, distribute) X millions = a daily routine that almost defies description.

Gwaz on the tourist catwalk

Later in the day on Friday as Gwaz and I wandered through a street market in Amstelveen, we noticed at one of the vendors the by-now familiar FloraHolland logo on the crates of flowers. Gwaz pointed it out to me, reached down to a bundle of tulips and said, “Oh hello; I think we saw you a couple of hours ago!”

Ant hills aren't this busy!