‘A fairly busy year’: Flower sales, and prices, skyrocket due to pandemic

By Cara Campbell

CALGARY (CityNews) — While businesses across Canada have been scrambling and trying to stay afloat during the pandemic, the same can’t exactly be said for the cut flower business.

Though the challenges faced by that industry were quite different in some respect, many Canadian florists have been kept very occupied during the pandemic.

For florist Monique Brittan, owner of Flower Chix in Calgary, this past year has been a wild ride.

“For flower shops, it’s actually been a fairly busy year,” said Brittan. “People can’t travel, so they’re sending flowers for new babies, birthdays, congratulations, things like that.”

Brittan acknowledges there are also significantly more tragic reasons related to the uptick in business.

“The other thing is there’s been a lot of sad occasions to send flowers,” she said.

Supply and demand

And while the demand is sky high, the supply is very low. For imported flowers, there are fewer flights to get them in the country, a decrease in the workforce worldwide because of COVID-19, and even weather events impacting the availability.

Meanwhile Canadian flower farmers are dealing with a seed shortage as competition for seeds is growing.

“It’s great, but there’s lots of new home gardeners who are also ordering seeds,” said Janis Harris of the Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers.

An increase in demand and a decrease in supply adds up to more expensive flowers. While it depends on the type, it’s not unheard of that certain varieties have doubled in price.

“We try as much as we can not to pass the cost along to the end user, but for certain flowers we do have to increase prices somewhat,” said Brittan.

Regardless of the increasing prices – the demand doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Flower Chix is expanding in part due to the business this year. And others are seeing the impact every day, saying they’ve never sold as much as they have this April.

“We went from barely using our online system to now, every day, like I mean I probably had eight orders today to go out,” said Harris.

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