“Are you coming along to the auction?” I’ve been going there with my father since I was six years old. I used to love it! We would drive down in the green van on Wednesday and Sunday afternoons to deliver the chrysanthemums.
While Dad unloaded the boxes, I would get busy stapling and stamping labels: ‘ 80 x Regal Westland ‘. All youth sentiment now! The top rows were always quite difficult, though. You had to climb on the trolley in order to reach them. I even remember the load factor: 24 boxes per trolley and 48 per van. This way, we’d fill exactly two trolleys every delivery, there wouldn’t be any room left for a single box!
Nowadays, I’m thirty years older and based in an entirely different continent, but optimally loading and using cargo areas is just as relevant as back then. And with air freight, it’s not just about the volume of the boxes like with ground transportation, but the weight matters too.
The relation between them is expressed in volume weight (in kg). This is easy to calculate using this formula: length x width x height (in centimetres) / 6000. And if you know the air cargo rate per kg, it’s easy to calculate the air transport costs per box.
There’s only one disadvantage: in Ecuador or in Colombia, there’s unfortunately no such thing as a standard box size for flowers. Not to mention a fixed number of stems per box. It’s every man for himself here, so each nursery chooses its own way. That makes it harder to calculate your cost price.
A simple example using roses: a nursery has between three and five different sizes of boxes, from cute small ones to large coffin sized. But his neighbour uses slightly different sized boxes, so you end up in a jungle of dozens of different box sizes. And now try and load them all, nicely stacked, onto an aircraft pallet. That’s a jigsaw for experts!
In the past, our umbrella organizations have tried to introduce standardization of box sizes, but they haven’t yet succeeded.
It just shows that those packaging standards of VBN are not so crazy after all.
Victor van Dijk,
Manager South America, FleuraMetz
