Evaluation of Transportation Practices in the California Cut Flower Industry

Abstract

In the past two decades, California's share of the national cut flower market has decreased from 64 percent to 20 percent. California growers' largest competitors are South American growers; Colombia controls 75 percent of the US market. South American growers have several competitive advantages, including the favorable trucking rates they enjoy by consolidating all shipments in Miami, Florida prior to US distribution. This paper evaluates the California cut flower industry's current transportation practices and investigates the feasibility and cost of establishing a shipping consolidation center in Oxnard, California. Applying a simple inventory management policy, we estimate a 35 percent system-wide transportation cost decrease of $20 million per year if all California cut flower growers participate in the consolidation center. The California Cut Flower Commission incorporated our findings into an application for federal funds from the US Department of Transportation to construct a new flower transportation and logistics center in California. The state's flower growers are also searching for alternative ways to cooperatively fund a consolidation center.

Truck and Cross-Docking Scheduling in the Flower Export Sector in Colombia

“…Trailer trucks are only used by large farms. This situation is not limited to Colombia; a similar situation is reported in the United States ( 17 ). In our surveys presented in Asocolflores ( 18 ), we identified that truckloads were rarely consolidated and that each farm uses or hires its own trucks.…”

“…These agents include farms, cargo agents, land transporters, cargo operators, and airlines. The breakage of the cold chain along the way is reflected in quality problems, reduction of profits, and ultimately the loss of market share ( 16 , 17 ). The cold chain in our case is affected by the long queue times because the truck drivers turn off their air conditioning to save energy at the parking lots of the airport, and consequently, the cold chain is broken.…”

MIP formulations for perishable fresh foods transportation

“…The food hub concept is applied on delivering food to urban customers which construct a consolidation as an urban distribution centre [1]. This consolidation idea is also applied on transported flowers from California [2]. A novel mixed integer programming formulation is conducting to solve the problem of a two-level supply chain which contains production sites, client areas and a discrete time horizon [3].…”

Decomposition‐based approximation algorithms for the one‐warehouse multi‐retailer problem with concave batch order costs

“…We also extend some results to general nondecreasing subadditive order and holding costs. Our study is motivated by agricultural supply chains (Nguyen, Dessouky, & Toriello, 2014;Nguyen, Toriello, Dessouky, & Moore, 2013;Zhang, Uhan, Dessouky, & Toriello, 2018), where local growers send product via short-haul transportation services to a consolidation center, which then delivers it to a destination via long-haul transportation services. Both echelons can choose from multiple shipping options, for example, fixed full-truckload (FTL) rates, linear less-than-truckload (LTL) rates and courier rates, and thus the resulting transportation cost function exhibits economies of scale captured by piecewise linear (PWL) concave batch costs.…”