More than 36,000 floral arrangements to be handled in warehouse
MIAMI, Fla. ­- CrowleyFresh, Crowley Maritime Corp.’s cold storage warehouse and logistics services company in Miami, is expected to prepare more than 36,000 floral arrangements for this year’s Valentine’s Day. For the past six weeks, employees have been hard at work receiving, assembling and preparing a variety of boxes, vases, and plush toys (hard goods); chocolates and flowers for shipment in anticipation of one of the biggest floral-gift seasons of the year. “Valentine’s Day is almost a two-month event for our cold-chain warehouse,” explained Alexis Castillo, CrowleyFresh manager of logistics. “The season starts early in the year as we begin to receive and store different kinds of hard goods for our clients’ e-commerce and retail orders. Then, a week before Valentine’s Day, fresh-cut flowers from Ecuador, Guatemala and Colombia arrive by air-freight and start to fill our temperature-controlled warehouse with their beautiful colors and sweet scents. Quality is our number one 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. Our teams are dedicated to 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 is able to accommodate seasonal products such as flowers around Valentine’s Day and Mothers’ Day. Susan Rodríguez, account executive for CrowleyFresh, added, “We are committed to providing each of our clients complete, refrigerated supply chain logistics services to ensure their products remain at the peak of freshness throughout the cold chain, from point of origin to final destination. We leverage our knowledge and expertise in logistics so they can concentrate on growing their business.” The company’s customers appear to be noticing and appreciating this focus. CrowleyFresh recently received two monthly performance awards from a leading U.S.-based gourmet food and floral gift provider. “This is our second consecutive year winning this award against eight different service providers across the nation,” said Rodriguez. “The CrowleyFresh team is committed to its customers, their products and their suppliers, ensuring we accomplish our motto at all times - keep it cool, keep it moving, and keep it fresh, CrowleyFresh.” 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 facility is ideal for perishable storage 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 124-year-old marine solutions, energy and logistics services company, please visit www.crowley.com.