Floral Update: Cultivating Sustainability: María Flowers and LATAM Group Lead the Floral Industry Towards a Greener Future

March 26, 2024

Our industry mission extends beyond arranging blooms and selling plants—it's about fostering a community where we can share ideas and insights to drive consumer purchase, increase our best practices in areas like sustainability and data, and more. The power behind these great insights and efforts? Our members, especially those who contribute through volunteer leadership. Here are updates from two of our taskforces so far this year:

Our Floral Sustainability Task Force spearheads the efforts to help all members embrace climate smart practices. This month, we focused on an initiative from María Flowers, who provided a powerful case study for the industry.

In 2023, María Flowers, in partnership with LATAM Group, embarked on a groundbreaking journey towards sustainability by joining the "1+1: Offset to Conserve" program. By compensating for 50% of their CO2 emissions, they offset an impressive 1,297 tons of CO2, showcasing the tangible impact of sustainable practices.

Through LATAM Cargo Chile’s commitment to environmental preservation, María Flowers contributed to vital projects across Colombia, Chile, and Peru. These projects, certified by esteemed organizations such as the Gold Standard and Verified Carbon Standard Program, aim to protect ecosystems, promote renewable energy, and prevent deforestation.

Projects such as CO2Bio in Colombia, Cururos Wind Farm in Chile, and Nii Kaniti Community Forest Management in Peru benefit from this initiative. These endeavors symbolize a collective effort towards safeguarding our planet’s precious ecosystems, made possible through collaborative action within the floral industry.

We are proud of María Flowers for their part in taking this first step with LATAM, and we hope this sets a trend to offset CO2 and make the world a better place. Thanks goes to Felipe Villamizar who shared this story with us.

If you are looking to implement sustainability practices but maybe don’t know where to start, you may want to familiarize yourself what the American Floral Endowment (AFE) is doing with Sustainabloom. Launching soon, Sustainabloom is looking to support the floral industry by providing simple resources on how companies can implement sustainability practices.

Next, the Demand Creation Task Force for Floral is working on increasing sales in July, August and September.  These are typically the slower months of the year with excess product available from the farms.  The Task Force is encouraging all retailers to utilize one of the many national holidays that fall in this time frame and sell it up with plants and flowers. Here are some of these special days in that time frame:

Hugs and Smiles: this is an over-arching campaign to promote that a gift of flowers or plants is a hug and smile to anyone that receives it. It works any time of the year!
Special Calendar Dates:
4th of July

Global Forgiveness Day July 7
National Give Something Away Day July 15
National Listening Day July 18
International Self-Care Day July 24
National Sister Day Aug 4
Son and Daughter Day Aug 11
Relaxation Day Aug 15
World Humanitarian Day Aug 19
Senior Citizen’s Day Aug 21
Women’s Equality Day Aug 25
National Grief Awareness Day Aug 30
National Girlfriends Day Aug 1
International Day of Clean Air Sept 7 (CONSIDER PLANTS specifically)
National Grandparents Day Sept 8
Suicide Prevention Day Sept 10
Patriot Day Sept 11

If you are a retailer who is looking to try a campaign around a new holiday, let me know how it goes! We’d love to help share your success and your challenges to help life purchases for the whole supply chain.

 I wanted to close this edition with two things I’m reading about:

This is a great article from FloralDaily about IFPA member, Sun Valley, who partnered with the city of San Francisco to bring 80,000 tulips to Union Square in San Fran. What an amazing way to show up in your community to build energy around our industry!

This is a great recap from one of our members in Poland. They hosted a wedding floral show and the results were creative, fresh and a beautifully elevated way to present our products.

If you or your company has a best practice to share, please let me know. 

Cultivating Sustainability: María Flowers and LATAM Group Lead the Floral Industry Towards a Greener Future

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