In the heart of downtown Los Angeles is L.A. LIVE, the sports and entertainment district that surrounds Staples Center and Nokia Theatre, featuring sports and music venues, nightclubs, the Grammy Museum and several movie theaters. On March 11-13 it was also alive with the 16th edition of the annual World Floral Expo at the Los Angeles Convention Center and it was a busy few days for members of the floral industry, networking and conducting business with each other.

For 2015 the show moved to Los Angeles from Chicago with a more than 40 percent increase in exhibitors. According to Dick van Raamsdonk, spokesman for HPP, the show’s organizers, this is the first time that U.S. and non-U.S. flower growers exhibited together at the same event in California. The 125 domestic and international exhibitors at the show represented 10 states from inside the U.S. — including 12 farms from California — and an additional 10 countries from outside the United States, including major suppliers such as Ecuador, Colombia and the Netherlands.

“Our pre-registrations for the show were nearly two times higher than last year and the preregistration figures have matched the reality, two times more people than Chicago,” van Raamsdonk told The Produce News. There were over 1,000 attendees from all over the world, some visitors coming from as far away as South Africa and Japan.

These glitter-edged roses from Naranjo Roses in Cotopaxi, Ecuador, caught the eyes of many attendees at the 2015 World Floral Expo in Los Angeles.Wholesale florists from across the country, event planners, buyers and local California retailers all attended the show. Among the supermarket chains represented were the Kroger Co., Stater Bros. Markets, Whole Foods and Albertsons/Safeway.

The exhibitors for the most part seemed to be pleased with the show. Mike Mellano, California grower, shipper and wholesaler, told The Produce News, “The attendance has been great, and we connected with maybe 40 or 50 existing customers and I am not sure how many new customers, but I would suspect maybe 20 or more. We will exhibit here again next year if it is here, but I’d prefer it to be in San Diego because I’m partial to that city.”

Celine Bray from Jet Fresh Flowers, a Miami shipper, told The Produce News, “It’s been great attendance, we’ve gotten to meet customers that we’ve been speaking with for many years and new customers as well; and we finally get to see their faces, which is always great to put a face with a voice. And we get to connect with our farms — we buy from most of the farms that are here — and we are looking for new varieties, new rose varieties and interesting Dutch and Italian product. There are a lot of California-grown flowers and we are excited to bring new flowers to Jet Fresh and get some new customers on board. We got to connect with a great plethora of wholesalers from Canada, and North Carolina.”

Monica Madera, representing the Ecuadorian rose farm Valle Verde, told The Produce News that she thought the best part of the show was “getting to know new customers, potential customers and actually getting to know about the L.A. Market; we were not aware of how it is, and it was important to us to get that understanding.”  

Michael LoBue, chief executive officer at the California Association of Flower Growers and Shippers, also expressed his satisfaction with the show. “We were very pleased with the show, with the attendance and with the quality of the attendees. There was plenty of time to get into the kind of dialogue and conversation that anyone wanted to have. So it was quite good and the feedback I ‘ve gotten so far from the CalFlower members who exhibited there was they are all very, very happy and they basically want to know the dates and location of next year’s show.” In addition, Lobue said, “I thought the conversation and the dialogue between the California growers and the other growers was very positive and we expected that; and the reason is that we all have the same big objective in mind and that is to increase the per capita consumption of flowers in this market.”

One popular group of exhibitors at the show were the rose breeders who displayed many of their most popular current varieties of roses, such as Hearts, Hallelujah and Plum Brule, along with with many new varieties just starting to come into production.

One such rose that caught attendees’ attention was Red Eye, a ranunculus-shaped, bright red rose with a green center from Olij Breeding in the Netherlands. A particularly sweet exhibit was the new varieties of fragrant roses coming to market, such as Lovely Hearts and Rosa Wendy-Kristy from the Dutch rose company Jan Spek Rozen.

Another highlight of WFE was an early morning tour of the original L.A. Flower Market on Wall Street. Bob Mellano, whose grandfather Giovanni started Mellano & Co. Inc. in Los Angeles in 1925, served as tour guide. Danean Allen from Armellini Express Lines in Palm City, FL, told The Produce News that she experienced sensory overload on the tour. “There were so many beautiful flowers in different varieties and colors in one location,” Allen said. “It was obvious that there is such a high demand in this market to keep the wholesalers profitable for years, with minimal turnover and a waitlist to lease space.”

As the show came to an end, van Raamsdonk was already looking ahead to next year and returning to California. “We will come back and go even bigger, and might contain one or two consumer days, in order to let the people of the city of Los Angeles and surrounding area get to know what is being done in the flower industry,” said van Raamsdonk. “In the end, the consumers are the most important people because if they don’t buy flowers, we don’t have a trade show.”