Your Sea Freight Development Agenda for a future-proof flower supply chain
Sea freight is gaining ground in the global flower business. With rising air freight costs, recurring capacity shortages, and growing concerns about the eco-footprint of global logistics, transporting flowers by ship is an attractive, complementary alternative. Are you a grower, forwarder, or buyer eager to futureproof your supply chain? Check this solid, 4-step Sea Freight Development Agenda.
In many areas of global logistics, sea freight is complementing - and in some cases replacing - air freight. With the volume of flowers shipped from Kenya to Europe by sea in 2022 two to three times higher than the year before, we expect sea freight volumes for flowers to reach new records around the world in 2023. For our industry’s supply chains, the benefits of sea freight are impressive. For example:
Getting sea freight-proof costs time and money
These results are not necessarily low-hanging fruit: getting your fresh-cut flowers from Africa or South America to Europe, or from the Netherlands to the USA, by sea is one thing; keeping them in top condition along the way is quite another. Longer shipping times require a relentless focus on quality, from post-harvest treatment and disease prevention to packaging, planning, and cold chain management. If you’re starting out with sea freight, ticking all of these boxes will require a serious and prolonged effort.?
Our 4-step Sea Freight Development Agenda
Rather than plunging in unprepared, we recommend a gradual, step-by-step transition toward sea freight-readiness. Whether you are a grower, forwarder or buyer, our Sea Freight Development Agenda provides a 4-step road map for that transition:
Based on your own performance data and our supply chain-specific FlowerWatch Quality Standards, this approach will help you to advance steadily and quickly toward full compliance - within a manageable timeframe and at a clear cost.
Step 1: Data-Driven Insights
At FlowerWatch, our Data-Driven Insights programme helps clients to grow their businesses by introducing a cycle of continuous improvement. This cycle begins with collecting performance data. We then analyse the data, convert them into actionable insights, and share these with you on a monthly basis using our Watch-itT? data platform and dashboard.
With each month of sea freight data collection providing new data, the easy gains can be won early on in the game, until over time every possible quality issue has been identified and resolved, and performance is at a consistently high level. From there, the troubleshooting continues, ensuring consistency and ongoing refinement. The result is high-quality flowers, long vase life, reduced cost and waste, happier customers and better business.
Identifying best practices for sea freight
The Data-Driven Insights programme is available to growers, forwarders and buyers on a subscription basis with a fixed monthly fee. For sea freight, it is a foolproof way of identifying weaknesses in the supply chain. During the prolonged shipping times involved in sea freight, bad practices in areas such as disease control, packaging and temperature control can cause damage or self-heating. The resulting shipping inefficiencies and quality losses can damage the trust of your customers and severely hinder your business.?
The 1st step in the Sea Freight Development Agenda is to tap into these Data-Driven Insights. This begins with FlowerWatch collecting data on your sea freight performance. We do this in different ways, ranging from audits at farms and consolidation points to vase life testing and cold chain monitoring, for which we place data loggers in flower shipments to track time-temperature exposure. We also perform routine quality checks on your packaging, where poor practices can cause substantial damage.?
Immediate gains from your performance data
In many cases, the insights bring improvement opportunities to light that your company can implement immediately. For example, you may need to refine your post-harvest treatment, or tailor to specific properties of your cultivars. Or you may need to introduce more efficient, effective, and sustainable boxes - and train your staff in packaging - to achieve a higher pack rate with lower waste and quality loss and an improved financial case. Another issue our Data-Driven insights often bring to light is that your flowers are exposed to unhealthy temperatures for too long at different moments before, during and after shipping - for example, when they have been delivered by truck to the point of consolidation before being loaded into sea containers. With the information our data loggers collect, you can see precisely which temperatures occur where and when. And with our expertise in flower quality and vase life, we can tell you precisely what damage this time-temperature is causing, and how much business it will keep costing you if you do not solve the problem.
Discover how our Data-Driven Insights programme can bring to light the actions you can take to transform your business
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Step 2: R&D Sprints
The cycle of continuous improvement you set off with a Data-Driven Insights subscription can bring to light sea freight challenges that call for extra effort. You can tackle these with our experts in what we call ‘R&D Sprints’, the 2nd Step in your Sea Freight Development Agenda. These are solution-driven projects with a clearly defined goal, time frame, and cost.?
R&D Sprint example: situation-specific disease control
For example, the data may reveal that your flowers are suffering from a disease during shipping. We can immediately identify the problem, calculate how much damage it is causing to your business and come up with solutions. Our experts will design the best and most sustainable intervention for your situation and frame it in an R&D Sprint. The goal will always be to get to the source of the problem and solve it there. This can lead to measures ranging from adjusted post-harvest practices and cooling methods to using more suitable boxes for packaging. The R&D Sprint can include training your farm or shipping staff in how to consistently implement our solution, ensuring the highest standard possible in disease prevention.?
In addition to improving your sea freight-readiness, this situation-specific approach, backed by the latest science, will also strengthen your eco footprint - adding to your reputation as a futureproof business. We can offer this kind of expertise thanks to our ongoing engagement with the horticultural science community and our many years of field experience.?
Problem-specific sprints for any player
An R&D Sprint can be designed to resolve any given sea freight problem you may be facing. Our R&D Sprints are also available to companies who do not yet subscribe to the Data-Driven Insights programme.
Solve key problems or up your game with a FlowerWatch R&D Sprint
Step 3: Quality Control
The 3rd step in implementing our Sea Freight Development Agenda follows naturally from steps 1 and 2 and is called Quality Control. In this phase, we simply continue to generate and apply Data-Driven Insights, launching R&D Sprints when and where necessary. Here, the audits, data logging and the Watch-itT? dashboard prove their worth as vital instruments for the continuity of your business, helping us to ensure together that your supply chain’s sea freight performance never fails and that your company keeps a steady lead on the market standard.
Step 4: Market your success with FlowerWatch Approved certification
The 4th and final step in the Sea Freight Development Agenda is to grow your business by sharing your quality performance with your market. To this end, you can apply for FlowerWatch Approved certification. Labelling your brand and products as certified offers your buyers and stakeholders external, independent proof that your flowers and supply chain are monitored and standardised professionally, and meet the highest quality norms on the market today. The FlowerWatch Approved certificate and your open communication about performance are your ticket to continuous improvement, trusting customers and healthy growth.
Want to discuss the potential of our Sea Freight Development Agenda for your company? Contact us today