Another Valentine’s Day in Full Bloom at CrowleyFresh

CrowleyFresh, Crowley Maritime Corp.’s cold storage warehouse and logistics services company in Miami, prepared more than 35,000 floral arrangements for this year’s Valentine’s Day.

For the past six weeks, employees have been hard at work receiving, assembling and preparing more than 20,000 flower orders, 2,500 of which also contained specialty chocolates. Additionally, the warehouse handled more than 11,000 buckets of fresh cut flowers equating to more than 100,000 bouquets for distribution throughout the U.S. for buyers who prefer to handpick individual flowers from local retail stores.

“Valentine’s Day starts very close to the beginning of each new year at CrowleyFresh,” explained Alexis Castillo, CrowleyFresh manager of logistics. “We begin to receive and store different kinds of hard goods for our clients’ e-commerce and retail orders about six weeks prior to the actual holiday. Then, a week before Valentine’s Day, fresh-cut flowers from Central and South America arrive by air-freight and start to fill our temperature-controlled warehouse.”

“Quality is our No. 1 priority so once the flower bouquets start to arrive, we quickly prepare them for fresh delivery by cutting the stems and hydrating them for a minimum of three hours,” he said. “Our teams are detail-oriented, carefully and accurately assembling each order and preparing them for shipment as scheduled.”

CrowleyFresh handles a wide variety of import-export fruit, vegetables and other perishables throughout the year, and can accommodate seasonal products like flowers around Valentine’s Day and Mothers’ Day by both ocean and air.  As an air freight forwarder, we rely on our in-warehouse air consolidation partner Air Menzies International (AMI) to determine the most cost-efficient and effective routing of customer shipments by air worldwide. As a Certified Cargo Screening Facility, we also provide receiving validation services, pallet utilization and daily local truck delivery for AMI to nearly Miami International Airport.

CrowleyFresh is a partnership between Crowley and Customized Brokers that bundles individual cold-chain storage and logistics offerings into one comprehensive solution, including customs brokerage, air-freight and trucking services. The state-of-the-art cold storage facility is ideal for distribution of perishables, or as an in-transit consolidation/deconsolidation point. It features high-tech cooling and monitoring equipment, multiple humidity and temperature-controlled coolers including forced air pre-cooling, which can be adjusted to meet and maintain varying temperature requirements, and accommodate perishables being imported and exported to/from Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, South America, Asia and the Far East, and South Florida. With over 400,000 total cubic feet of refrigerated space and about 17,000 square feet of dry storage space for non-perishables, the facility offers warehousing options for a diverse array of cold-chain management services. For more information please visit www.crowleyfresh.com.

For more information about Crowley, the 126-year-old marine solutions, energy and logistics services company, please visit www.crowley.com