Here's what it takes to pick, pack, and ship 150 million Valentine's Day roses from Colombia to your local florist

Rachel Premack

February 13, 2019 7:49 PM

Rachel Premack/Business Insider

To understand how the Colombian flower industry works, we visited Elite Flower, a 28-year-old flower company with more than two square miles of flower production. Elite Flower grows 200 varieties of roses alone and employs 12,000 workers during its peak season.

Americans will spend an estimated $2 billion on roses this Valentine's Day .
The overwhelming majority of those blooms come from Colombia, particularly the temperate highlands outside of Bogot and Medelln.
Business Insider traveled to Colombia to learn why roses are grown there and how the floral industry is shaping the country.

FACATATIV, COLOMBIA Your Valentine's Day roses were probably cut from the stem in a farm outside of Bogot by a man like Ral Olmos.

Olmos has worked in Colombia's flower fields for two decades. And the scope of his job has changed massively since he started working in the Colombian flower industry.

Since the early 1990s, flowers have grown to become one of Colombia's biggest exports shipping more than $1.4 billion cut flowers per year , just slightly less than gold and coffee. Nearly 80% of the flowers go to the US.

And Valentine's Day roses lead the pack among Colombian flowers. For FranciscoRicaurte, a general director of UPS in South America, the months leading up to Valentine's Day are peak season not Christmas simply because the region sends so many roses to North America.

The tremendous growth of the Colombian floral industry is thanks to a slew of US policy changes, an excellent local ecosystem, a location that's actually more convenient to export from than former floral hub California, cheaper labor, and a transportation network that includes everything from airplanes to massive refrigerated warehouses to modest carts.

Here's the process of bringing 150 million roses from the Colombian savanna to your local florist and why the system works the way it does:

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