Laura Demaree Shinall has been named president of Syndicate Sales Inc., the family floral hardgoods supplier in Kokomo, IN, started by her grandparents in 1946. She succeeds her father, Del Demaree, who continues as chairman.

A graduate of DePauw University in Greencastle, IN, Laura Shinall has been in the floral industry for three decades with experience in retail and wholesale florist operations. She began her career as a wholesale floral supply manager at Kennicott Bros. Co. in its Milwaukee, WI, office.

“Supermarket buyers pay extremely close attention to margins and are catering to America’s very price-sensitive consumers,” said Alaina Paradise, owner of One World Flowers in Denver, stating why she thinks Fair Trade flowers have not caught on in supermarkets here. Since 2007, One World has imported Fair Trade flowers exclusively, currently from farms in Ecuador.

The incoming head of the Floral Council of the Produce Marketing Association sees the 30-member group’s main task in the year ahead as developing a workable program that can be carried out by volunteers while the council builds upon its success at the PMA Fresh Summit and attracts the financial support to carry out the program.

After experimenting with third-party vendors in the flower-delivery business, Amazon.com appears interested in expanding into that area itself. A 17-year industry veteran said the move “only once again highlights how important it is for supermarket floral operations to develop and promote their own online floral selling programs.”

Amazon, an online retail giant and Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, quietly entered the rapidly expanding online floral market in early August with its own line of fresh-cut flower bouquets, called the Amazon Curated Flower Collection.

Sales of Hawaii’s floriculture and nursery products declined for the fifth year in a row, according to a report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The annual review for 2012 found overall floriculture sales of $69.1 million dropped by one percent from 2011. Sales have dropped since a record high of $108.7 million in the pre-recession year of 2007.

FloralHolland is in Dutch with a group of irate flower and plant traders from The Netherlands. The group has filed a lawsuit against FloraHolland, according to the Dutch wholesale florist association VGB. Their demand is that the pending increase in the auction clock rates for 2014, which the flower auction set without the seemingly required agreement from its trader clients, be struck down.