DAILY BREEZE
New route promises LAX a rose garden
By Gene Maddaus, Staff Writer
April 3, 2009
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa got a warm reception inside the 12,700-square-foot
cooler at Mercury Air Cargo that will house flowers and perishable
products flown in each day from South America. (Brad Graverson
/ Staff Photographer)
If you bought a bouquet of roses recently,
chances are it came from Colombia.
If it did, it probably arrived on a
plane in Miami, where it was loaded onto a refrigerated truck
for a long cross-country drive.
That circuitous supply route is getting
a lot shorter, however, thanks to a new cold-storage facility
at Los Angeles International Airport.
L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was
on hand this morning to officially open the facility, which is
kept at a brisk 35 degrees. The goal is to turn Los Angeles into
a hub for distribution of flowers on the West Coast, which could
result in lower prices at local flower shops.
For example, before the facility opened
it might take 71 hours to transport a flower from Colombia to
Miami and then to Portland, Ore. Now, if the flowers come through
LAX, it might take only 21 hours.
That also reduces costs. Whereas it
might have cost $6 to transport a single rose before, now it might
be around $2.
The Mercury Air Cargo warehouse is
now handling six planeloads of flowers every week, three from
Bogotá, Colombia, and three from Quito, Ecuador.
"Before we never had that kind
of capacity," said David Herbst, of Mercury Air Group. "Los
Angeles never had a large enough refrigeration unit to process
that many flowers."
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