Cool Rooms Play an Important Role in the Success of Flower Shops

17 June 2019

Let’s cut straight to the chase. Cool rooms don’t just keep flowers fresh, they stop them from blossoming. In effect, the cold acts like a pause button. That means, should a large delivery of floral merchandise arrive at a shop, the staff can create a biological buffer for themselves. Instead of the merchandise opening, according to some biological imperative, a temporary halt is placed on its growth cycle.

Cool Rooms Are Floral Time Machines

Or maybe they should be described as stasis chambers, like the suspended animation devices found in science-fiction movies? Whatever the label, their purpose is clear. By taking a product that has a finite lifespan, by placing that time-sensitive organic inventory in a chilly cool room, a shop owner gains a kind of superpower. They can suspend a flower’s blossoming cycle. Okay, this power is temporary, for the plants are still aging, but they’re now ripening at a very slow pace. Stabilized and locked into the budding stage, flowering petals won’t put in an appearance until a florist is ready to make an arrangement.

Working Without a Cool Room Sure, the room is equipped with a refrigeration unit, but the cool breeze blown from that ceiling-mounted appliance isn’t meant to freeze anything. There goes the suspended animation analogy, but that’s okay. No, there’s a late autumn chill inside the glass-walled room, not a flower-killing winter frost. Without that cold, a truck-full of budding plants would flower after a few days of storage. Even the ambient warmth in a shop office would be enough to trigger the blossoming stage. Imagine the scene, with every single flower showing off its petals over the span of two or three working days. For the shop staff, the colourful display would be magnificent, but no one else would get to enjoy that flowery scent or the richly-hued petals, for that matter. As the floral arrangements came together, they’d wilt and spoil. What’s left to say? Successful flower shops won’t enjoy their profits for long if their arrangements leave the shop looking lifeless and desiccated.

Suffice to say, flower shops need cool rooms. Those sealed little rooms keep flowers rosy fresh and fabulous. Of course, since they’re part of a shop’s overall appearance, metal panels and opaque insulants are out. Instead of those energy-saving wall panels, glass-walled plates and sliding doors are given preference. The polished glass shows off a just-blossomed arrangement while the budding plants remain concealed on a second or third row. Why, there’s even a separate work area in there, where arrangements are stored until they’re ready to be delivered, en masse, to a wedding or large event. Basically, this is a flower shop’s buffer area, and it’s that buffer that gives a shop owner power over a flower’s growth cycle.

Mark Connelly
C&M Coolroom Services
E-mail: markconnelly@cmcoolrooms.com.au
Mobile: 0412 536 315

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