Valentine's Day Push (Part 1)

¡Ay, Caramba!

A little over a week to Valentine’s Day, and Sun Valley is humming at top speed. Being relatively new to the Sun Valley team; this my first Valentine’s Day on the farm and it is truly something to behold. In Arcata we have been literally working around the clock picking tulips and lilies for Valentine’s Day orders.

At Sun Valley one of our mottos is “…creating the best floral experience through operational excellence.” This is the time of year when you see what operational excellence really means. We have a huge capacity for growing and picking flowers, this is the time of year when we get to flex all the muscles we have built over the years.

Tulips fresh from the ground.

Out in the greenhouses, the tulips are coming in fast and furious. Crews are picking them as quickly as they mature. Tulips get pulled out of the soil and put in crates, and then a team member drives them right into the grading and bunching warehouse. Here they go on conveyor belts and get sorted by size and color, then bunched and sleeved for various customers. This is space is designed for high production, and that is what is happening now.


The Tulip Line

The vibe on the tulip line is really great. Music is blasting and our team members are all up for the big holiday push. 


Here our team member, Tara Pack, holds some beautiful “Jan van Ness” yellow tulips.

After being bunched and graded, the flowers get put in buckets for their first drink of water and a dose of special flower food.  Next they are wheeled into the shipping coolers. It is a great sight to see a train of tulips, iris or lilies being pulled through the big warehouse doorways.


David Long with a train a tulips.

The shipping warehouse is where the “rubber hits the road”, it is one thing to grow a huge amount of flowers, it is an entirely different thing to get them all boxed up and put on trucks and planes in an orderly fashion. I took some time to talk with one of our most experienced team members David Long. David has been working here about 20 years and he has seen firsthand the wild ebbs and flows in the floral industry. He was nice enough to take a moment and give me some insight into how our operation is functioning this holiday season.

Lily: So David what is the difference between a Valentine’s Day rush today, and ones in the past?

David: The amount of product we can ship today was impossible 20 years ago. Back then we didn’t have the proper organization to ship the huge orders we do today.

Lily: What’s changed?

David: Today, we have the skills and technology to see the big orders through. Years ago, a big order would take a whole day to put together, now those same big orders are just one of many orders we do in a single day. Our computer system allows us to plan, layout, organize and flawlessly ship immense orders.

Lily: How does this affect the packing crews?

David: In the old days we would be here literally 16 to 18 hours a day. Team members would get burned out, people would just hit the wall with exhaustion. Now, we are still working some overtime, but with the technology in place, we are working much smarter and much more efficiently.

I noticed David starting to get impatient and look down the line for the next train of tulips, so I figured I better cut this conversation short, and let him get back to his task.

After the tulips are boxed, they patiently await shipping out on the loading dock. This is the coldest warehouse space, and the semi-trucks are being loaded with pallet after pallet of fresh flowers. This vast space is usually about half full as orders are made ready to leave the farm. Right now there are boxes up to the ceiling and crews enduring the frigid conditions to make sure the flowers are sent on their way in perfect condition.


Boxes of flowers in the shipping cooler.

Walking through this area, making sure all our “i”s are dotted and “t”s are crossed, I found Vickie Balke. Vickie coordinates the order labels for our computerized system. All orders must have a label, and Vickie is one of the behind the scenes people at Sun Valley that is crucial. Somehow she sees the big picture of the shipping warehouse, and yet can tell you where a single box among thousand is located. I asked Vickie, how things were looking this year.

Vickie answered, “You know, we are doing really good this year because the managers have done a great job of spreading out our most knowledgeable team members."

She continued, “We bring on new, inexperienced team members for these holidays. This year we have our experienced people spread out evenly among the day shifts, night shift and cooler shifts, this is working out great. The packing is being done at the highest quality I’ve ever seen, and moral is high because everyone is feeling supported.”

It takes a lot of moving parts to live up to the excellent industry reputation Sun Valley is honored to hold. Bringing flowers to market at the highest quality is what we are all about, and to see the latent technological and human potential of our organization expand and activate into a dynamic force is pretty awe inspiring.

A big semi-truck closes it’s back door, and the driver hops into the cab for the haul. As the truck pulls out of the farm onto Upper Bay Road, it is kind of a bookend on a process that starts with a truck arriving with some crates full of bulbs. Soon those flowers and all this effort will be shared with loved ones somewhere across the county.

Smiles and heartfelt feelings will warm up this February and we will know we have done our job.

Next week we will follow our flowers as they head south.  Many go to the Prime or Armellini shipping docks for distribution, while others arrive at our Oxnard Farm for customers to pick up and also to be included in Sun Pacific bouquets. ...until next week.