Back from the Brink

We visit the Taipei Flower Market in Taipei’s Neihu District early one Monday morning in late autumn. It’s the busiest day of the week for Taiwan’s largest flower and plant market, and customers are busy exploring the offerings and making purchases. Watching as vendors hurry to pack and ring up purchases, with no time for a break, we find it hard to imagine just how different the market looked only a few months ago.

The pandemic has spurred Taiwan’s flower industry to develop Taiwan’s domestic market. The photo shows one of 2020’s innovations: locally grown flowers for sale in a supermarket chain.

Canceled events, excess supply

When the epidemic began to heat up in Taiwan in March, the emergence of occasional clusters of in­fection frightened the public. We responded by staying home as much as possible and halting large gatherings. Sales of flowers, which are often used to decorate event spaces, plummeted as a result.

In the era of globalization, problems in one region soon spread to others. The first reports of trouble in the flower market came from Kunming—truckloads of flowers no one wanted were awaiting disposal or destruction. The Netherlands were the next to see problems.

Taiwan’s market cooled off in early February, and the volume of unsold goods began to mount. “Market transactions fell by around 20%,” says Kevin Chung, general manager of the Taiwan Floriculture Develop­ment Associa­tion (TFDA). According to the Taipei Flower Market, at the market’s April low point, prices for flowers and plants were down 29% from the same period in the previous year.

Kevin Chung, general manager of the Taiwan Floriculture Development Association, says that the Covid situation has encouraged the industry to develop new distribution channels. With the government also providing support, these businesses have a great opportunity to transform themselves.

Rescuing themselves

The growth cycle of flowers is months or years long. Flower farmers bought the bulbs and seedlings of their current crop long before the pandemic began. Farmers can’t just press “pause” on their growth, and those plants are still coming into bloom.

The pandemic may have caught growers by surprise, but social media users soon stepped in to lend a hand. With the outbreak in Taiwan becoming serious in April, a Hsinchu flower shop called SMFP heard that a flower grower with which it had long worked was in need of assist­ance. The grower was looking for help selling garden roses that had been expected to be used at weddings.

Shop owner Bonnie tied the roses into bouquets, and spread the news about the grower’s troubles on Facebook, inviting online friends to buy the flowers as an act of charity.

She started out thinking she’d be lucky to sell 50 of the bouquets, but enthusiastic netizens snapped up all 600 that she had in stock in less than two hours. “We were gobsmacked!”

Hsinchu’s SMFP flower shop caters to a young, sophisticated clientele.

Developing domestic demand

The government has also joined hands with flower-­related organizations to help the flower industry through this difficult time. Their efforts have included using the market’s excess flowers and plants to create floral carpets and other landscape installations, and to fill greenhouses in public locations such as Da’an Park, Yuanshan Park, the Shilin Official Residence, and Xinwuri Railway Station; arranging flowers into bouquets for frontline healthcare and disease control personnel; and working with schools in Taipei and Changhua to promote interest in flowers through DIY activities. All of the various ­measures have worked by first drawing the public’s attention to the domestic flower industry, and then establishing easily accessible sales channels.

At the end of April, the Council of Agriculture and the TFDA persuaded supermarket chains such as PX Mart, Carrefour and Funcom to begin selling fresh flowers to provide consumers with more convenient access to the product.

The market responded enthusiastically. Online inquiries poured in as soon as the news was released. PX Mart, which initially offered flowers in 50 Taipei stores, even announced that it would expand the program to 100 stores by year’s end.

The flower market began to recover in May after Taiwan’s Covid-19 outbreak was brought under control. Mother’s Day provided an additional boost to prices, which rebounded from their lows. By July, prices were actually 14.6% above those of the same period in the previous year.

Flowers are not a necessity, but a luxury. But with the pandemic causing people to limit their activities outside the home and some countries undergoing lockdowns, the public has chosen to redirect a portion of its consumption to flowers as a means of beautifying their homes and lifting their spirits. The flower market looks set to recover quickly once the pandemic recedes. More, a public that has become accustomed to buying flowers during the pandemic is likely to spur the industry to even greater heights once the crisis passes.