Edible flowers are our signature fresh product offering. Our organically grown flowers are harvested early in the morning, packed into boxes and sent to our clients the same day. Any leftover flowers will be dried or used for our pantry products.
Our flower selection is selected from varieties that thrive in our hot lowland climate that allows our clients to offer a more local product narrative unlike most other suppliers based in cooler highland farms offering cool temperate, European flowers.
The flowers have a wide range of intrinsic properties- colour, flavour, fragrance. Some are beautiful to look at with little flavour, some are delicious - we leave it to the chefs and culinary creatives to figure out how our flowers suit them best, from the tiniest petal to embellish, a sprig in a beverage, a flavour pop or sprinkled in colour arrangements to suit their dishes.
Warm box, Cool Box
We offer mixed boxes of flowers- we don't offer a list that customers can curate items of their choice. This is primarily to manage our small footprint, shifts in bloom cycles and weather conditions, and customer demand that is different everyday. We also need to regularise the work for our workers to easily understand and we need to make sure customers get a minimum of 4 types per box but we keep the colour palette consistent. We also prioritise our contract customers that have orders 2 or 3 times a week.
Our basic minimum order is 100gms - which is 2 boxes: one box warm colours (orange, reds, pinks) and one box cool colours ( yellows, blues, whites). When the order increases- we keep to a similar colour strategy, maybe one box is all yellow and white or all blue etc. See below for an example of an order for 4 boxes/ 200 gms.
Storage
Once received, we advise our customers to keep the flowers in airtight containers in the chiller, preferably separated because the flowers emit different gases that affect their degradation rates differently. In general flowers can be kept for a week in the chiller which means most clients rely on a weekly delivery of flowers, some heavier users require two deliveries a week.
Clients also unavoidably have to go through a learning curve to coordinate their own tastes and preferences for usage, the slight shifts in the assortment of flowers that we provide, and the slightly different rates of longevity of the different types. We like to think that our clients that tend to be more creative and look to our produce as ways to distinguish themselves in the fiercely competitive culinary industry ultimately navigate this well and remain long time customers for us. We are less successful with clients that have large scale demands which are better served by producers with more standardised offerings. This doesn’t go without our understanding of shifts in business cycles, the need for menu changes and new market directions.
Rainy Mornings, Heavy Bloom Cycles and Special Orders
On rainy mornings all our flowers have to be fan dried before packing into boxes. Occassionally we have heavier bloom cycles which will be reflected in our boxes our be utilised in our pantry products like syrups and fermented flower bevereages
Occasionally we work with customers to provide specially curated boxes like roses for Valentine’s day or white flowers for a wedding cake. Sometimes we work with customers to adjust our supply to match their needs because their orders are large and they have some specific preferences. This requires agreement on both sides fulfill both the supply and demand side of this equation.
Dried flowers, Zero waste
While some flowers are grown specifically for drying, like roses, or fragrant flowers like Ylang Ylang, all excess flowers are usually dried and stored in glass jars in our pantry.
Our customers for dried flowers tend to be bakers who appreciate the lower perishablity of dried flowers, or they are mixologists who are interested in the intense flavours and aromas of dried items. In any case this also means that we have little to zero waste with our flowers - they either move into a different use category or go into our compost heaps.
Pantry Products, Research & Development, Client relations
We are also customers ourselves of our fresh produce turning them into interesting pantry products that could be valuable for our existing customers. For example we do frozen syrups, fermented beverages and vinegars made with our flowers, herbs and fruits.
We are also always looking for new flower types to offer and new techniques to farm them better and are always trialling new plantss and seeds and enjoy meeting clients to discuss whats going on in the market and giving them some insights and samples of things we are working on.
We are also subject to a business environment that is not necessarily understanding of the amount of research and work that has been required to build our specialty business- so we are somewhat guarded about revealing names and types of flowers that we grow. And we also value our relationships with our customers - so we do insist on a close review of potential clients, what they do, where they are located, to ensure we protect ours and our clients’ businesses. We only work business to business with food and beverage enterprises, we don’t generally work with middlemen or individual buyers as this suits us best.
If you are interested in working with us - contact Chris on whatsapp and send us details about your business name, type, exact location and any links to your website and social media and we will take it to the next step.