The Bloom Is Off Home-Grown Roses
California’s Rose Bowl may be known the world over, but its once proud rose-growing industry is fading from the landscape, pushed to the brink of extinction by soaring costs and intense competition from Ecuadorean and Colombian blooms.
Even California supermarkets such as Ralphs, which once stocked local roses, are now touting the larger blooms and more unusual colors of South American imports. Signs at Ralphs urge customers to “Say It With Ecuadorean Flowers!”
California growers “are not quite as on top of trends,” said Mark Held, owner of Mark’s Garden, a flower shop in Sherman Oaks. “They do not have the color availability that we can get from other locations and it’s no cheaper” to buy from local suppliers.
Although some believe California growers can win back market share from imports, others say the industry is destined to leave high-cost California just as carnation production did in the 1980s.
“In some cases, they are just growing nicer roses in Ecuador,” said Debbie Hamrick, editor of FloraCulture International magazine. “If you look at the California industry, half of [the operators] don’t meet world standards. They really fell asleep at the wheel.”
California rose growers used to supply 80% of all rose purchases in the state, said Lee Murphy, president of the California Cut Flower Commission. Now they supply just under half.
There are only 53 rose growers left in California, compared with 98 in 1993, and they produce 125 million stems of roses a year, most of them sold in the U.S., compared with the 518 million stems imported from Colombia and 374 million from Ecuador last year, according to USDA data.
Those growers that have managed to hang on through the high costs of this year’s energy crunch are hustling to reinvent themselves, investing in new rose varieties, innovative hydroponic growing techniques and more savvy promotion.
Innovation, however, comes with a large price tag, and given the rising cost of doing business in California, industry officials argue that it’s been hard for most growers to come up with the money needed to remain in the game.
“Growers are still getting the same return per stem that they did in 1984,” Murphy said. “They haven’t had a lot of money to put back into investments in their greenhouses.”
Prices of California flowers have remained flat, owing to competition with South American growers. Most California and South American stems fetch the same price, about $18 to $21 a bunch, according to Department of Agriculture statistics, with some large Ecuadorean roses garnering $21 to $23 a bunch, but South American growers have much lower labor costs than growers in the Golden State and therefore earn a bigger profit on their blooms.
Growers in California have begun to turn things around by adopting innovative new hydroponic growing systems and techniques from companies in Holland, the center of rose breeding.
By delivering a more precise amount of nutrients and keeping a more even temperature, growers here have been able to get more blooms per stem.
But getting florists more interested in these blooms is another story.
Although many local growers cultivate the same varieties as their Ecuadorean counterparts, they are widely perceived as having an inferior product with a smaller, less showy head.
Encinitas grower Bob Echter remembers a designer working a recent charity event counting the petals on Echter’s Gypsy Curiosa roses to see how they measured up to some from Ecuador.
The California rose had 35 petals to Ecuador’s 50, a big difference in the designer’s mind, Echter said, but one that few others would notice.
To keep the sale, Echter wound up touting what most growers here feel is their biggest selling point, their proximity and ability to ship flowers that will last longer in the vase--a point that its marketing groups are beginning to promote aggressively.
“We can put stuff on [refrigerated] trucks at 35 degrees and guarantee it will get to Delaware at 35 degrees,” Murphy said. “We can give customers something superior, and also something that will last in their home for 10 days if [distributors] do it right.”
Echter is hoping to come up with some unusual hybrids of his own like the big-headed yellow rose he just planted called Yellow Island and a green-tinged Jade rose that is making its way into arrangements.
Competition from South America, Echter said, has forced him to become a better marketer, to stay on trends and change his roses more often, planting whatever’s hot, such as this year’s orange and lavender favorites.
But anticipating rose trends is a tricky and expensive business. Purchasing new varieties requires paying large upfront royalties. And if that orange rose isn’t a winner for years, then much of that investment is lost.
Not everyone has been able to invest enough to remain in the game.
Many Californians have left the business after being swallowed up by a larger competitor or switching to potted plants and more delicate flowers, which aren’t as easily air-freighted.
State statistician Fred Teensma, who has been tracking the state’s cut flower business for about two decades, said the shift into other blooms prompted the USDA for the first time last year to track certain other flowers, such as the 77 million California lilies sold wholesale last year.
Some of that boom, Teensma said, is owed to a shift in consumer demand. Instead of just bringing home bouquets of roses for special occasions, most people purchase more varied bouquets that feature roses along with a wide array of other flowers.
Ironically, California’s largest fruit and vegetable shipper, Westlake Village-based Dole Foods, is responsible for much of the imported competition.
Dole jumped into the business in 1998, acquiring four Miami-based cut flower businesses that own large amounts of acreage in Colombia and Ecuador and ship flowers to customers around the globe. It grows 150 varieties of roses in Colombia and controls 18% of the roses exported.
“We knew we could more cheaply move product [than other foreign companies],” said Moises Croitoru, Dole’s executive vice president in charge of cut flowers. And, he said, he knew Dole could sell stems to the same people it was selling produce.
Dole officials see roses as more of a developing-nation crop like its bananas, rather than a high-end crop suitable for California.
Andreus Koch, a Nipomo-based rose grower, said that if California growers are going to compete, they will have to make investments in marketing and constantly bring out new varieties to wow floral designers.
Koch poured $2 million recently into an overhaul that included a new, more recognizable flower goddess logo and advertising in bridal magazines, in hopes that brides will request his roses. The image overhaul has pushed sales up 12% in the last year and lifted prices for his stems to twice that of some of his peers.
He believes that California can reestablish itself as the innovator and purveyor of the world’s finest roses, especially to markets in the East, such as Boston, Philadelphia and New York, where California blooms are popular with influential floral designers.
“There are people willing to pay more for a product they perceive as being better,” Koch said. “We’re just trying to stay ahead and keep everything new and exciting.”
