BrownTales: Valentine's Day

Our BrownTales crew flew south of Bogota, Colombia to see UPS's role in getting Valentine's Day flowers to your front door.
Valentine’s Day is just around the corner and UPS is doing its part to ensure your sweetheart receives the freshest flowers possible. By Feb. 14, UPS expects to move more than 89 million fresh flowers from Bogota, Colombia, and Quito, Ecuador, through its Miami air hub. That’s enough flowers to fill 72 of our Boeing 767s. In anticipation of seasonal demand, UPS is adding 50 additional flights to and from Colombia and Ecuador.
“We’ve seen a tremendous increase in the number of flowers we ship from Colombia and Ecuador due to the great service that we’re delivering to our customers,” said UPS General Director of the Andean Countries Francisco Ricaurte.
Colombia and Ecuador are ideal locations for flowers to be grown due to the temperate year-round climate. Flowers are harvested, hydrated, packed in bunches and placed in coolers until refrigerated trucks moves them to the UPS gateway. The flowers are palletized and moved onto temperature-controlled aircraft, where they are flown to Miami.
Once in the U.S., the flowers are placed in UPS’s 27,000 square foot cooler - which is roughly the size of five basketball courts. The boxes are then cleared by customs and either picked up by local importers or shipped onto the rest of the country though Worldport. The entire process harvesting the flowers at the farm to delivering them to the importer takes an average of 24 to 48 hours.
#UPS #BrownTales #ValentinesDay