Aalsmeer Flower Auction

If you’ve always wondered where your store-bought cut flowers came from, it’s highly likely that your florist had them flown all the way from The Netherlands. 

In the town of Aalsmeer, not far from the bustling city of Amsterdam, is the Aalsmeer Flower auction, the world’s largest flower auction.  Established in 1928, over 7 billion cut flowers (half of which are roses) and over 150 million plants are sold every year to buyers around the world.  Most of the flowers in the Aalsmeer auction house are grown by local producers, but some are imported from countries like Kenya, Zambia, and Israel. 

The Aalsmeer auction house itself is the largest commercial center in the world, with a floor space of over 846,000 square meters.  To put things into perspective - that’s about the size of nine football fields, all under one roof.  Inside the auction house are carts and carts of all sorts of flowers, from amaranths to zinnias. 

The flower auction begins when each cart is shown to the bidders one at a time.  The moment a cart is displayed, the large timing clock on the wall starts ticking.  As the time falls from 100, so does the price of the cart.  The first person who places a bid gets the cart at that price.  However, those who wait too long hoping to get a lower price fail to win the item if others are willing to pay more for it. 
  
Losing bidders still have the chance to get some of the flowers in every cart.  In each cart are a number of containers, and whoever wins the bid for the cart can choose to take all or just one of the containers.  If there are any containers left, the second highest bidder gets to take some or all of the remaining ones.  This goes on until all the containers in the cart are sold.

Once a cart is empty, the individual containers are taken and placed onto the cart of the florist who bought them.  If, for instance, Florist A bought five containers of sunflowers, these would be placed in Florist A’s cart. 

Open on Mondays to Fridays, the Aalsmeer auction house also welcomes flower growers and tourists who would like to witness the largest flower auction in the world.  Aalsmeer auctions begin at 6:30 a.m., but the hustle and bustle of transporting, importing, and selling flowers happens round the clock.