Jim McCann
speaker
66 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Jim McCann’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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will be the kinds of orders we'll have in each of the areas that cover each of the zip codes. So forecasting and modeling is extremely important because, as you know, we're dealing with a very perishable product. And so having that direct relationship with the very best florists around this country is paramount to our success. How do we predict it?
How do we work with our grower community to say this is how we're going to need our product in each market so the distribution works? And this time of the year, you know, it's in the northern hemisphere, it's difficult to grow a lot of products.
So this time of year, we'll be reaching into South America, we'll be reaching into, in some cases, Africa for our European partners to go with where the equator is. to grow our product to get it to our markets. As we get into different parts of the year, then our buying of product will move more to North America, to our growers around the US and around Canada to provide the product for us.
So it's a lot of planning, a lot of orchestration, a lot of modeling, a lot of predictability so that a retail florist who's the very best at what they do knows their market like nobody else can. And now we're giving them a great deal of data and input in terms of what to expect in their market, make sure they have the right product, the flowers, the containers they're going to need.
They can plan their budgeting around their staffing, how many drivers they'll need, what areas they'll need to cover, and to get that data back to us so that if you place an order with us, you'll get pinged the minute that order is delivered and there's a huge smile on the face of the recipient you intended.
Well, it's a little bit different at different times of the year. So this time of the year, weather is our primary concern. So we work a lot with FedEx, for example, on moving product around the country. And so we're watching the weather maps very closely. My advice is sell sweaters. Perishable products are tough.
I mean, when you pull into a fancy town like, let's say Los Angeles, you don't go to Beverly Hills and say, this is where all the florists live. It's a tough business. It's a good business. There's lots of wonderful people in it. But there are so many variables that can give you grief. You can have everything planned out perfectly. And an ice storm. We just had ice storms throughout the Southwest.
All of a sudden, planes can't fly. Florists can't get their trucks out. So you have to plan around that. And then you have to have the customer service people in place to be able to deal with the order that was supposed to be there today, but nothing was moving. So where is she going to be tomorrow? We want to reroute the flowers to make sure they get to the right place.
So there's a lot of intricacies. It's a lot like watching sausage being made. You don't want to. But after 40 plus years of doing this, we have it down to a pretty good science. But I don't encourage it for the people who are faint of heart.
Indeed. The good news about food companies, all the people eat every day. Hmm. And they don't have quite the spikes in demand that we would have in the floral and gift business. And frankly, one of the reasons we got into food gifts is we saw that our customers, especially during, I mentioned during the COVID period, we didn't know what was going to happen when COVID first started in March of 20.
And like a week or two in, all of a sudden, demand went through the roof. At the same time, all of a sudden, we were trying to learn to work from home. for those people in office settings, keeping our people safe in production. And in answer to your question about agriculture, agriculture is a big part of what we do with all its commensurate risks.
So we have food acreage production around the country, most heavily concentrated In Oregon, where our Harry and David operations are, we have 5,000 acres of agricultural production where we grow the world-famous pears that we're known for. And we have a million pear trees that we tend to every day. We grow peaches, we grow apples, we grow kiwis, we grow grapes. So we grow our food.
So we're absolutely vertically integrated there. On the flower side of things, because the different growing seasons will take us to other countries, throughout the year. We don't own the land. We'll contract grow with people who own their land to say, I need 15 million roses this week.
So we have to guarantee them the right return on that so that they'll plant the plants, that they'll tend to them, they'll harvest them and get them to us on time. So there we don't own the land, but we're contracting with the best growers in the world to produce the products we need when we think we need the most.
Well, they're so different than the pears that you'd see normally in a grocery store. But living in LA, you would know that once a year we do a big deal with Trader Joe's and the pears that are delicious and almost perfect, but didn't make it to our gift selection. We have a deal with Trader Joe's where we have one week where we sell those pairs off.
And boy, is that a big week for us and Trader Joe's when we have those pairs in their stores.
Well, I can only speak to what we do. And let's take, for example, the pears. We grow them in southwest Oregon. There's only three spots on the globe that they grow. in Southwest Oregon and Chile and in New Zealand. And we grow them in all three spots. So it's different seasonality.
So it gives us a much longer selling season by being able to grow in those three different spots because it's three different times of the year that they come in.
But we I never thought I'd be so focused on the impact of climate change, which I am now convinced is real and dangerous and we need to be very serious about it, because I see the weather impact that has on us and in southwest Oregon and how that has an impact on our. on our crop, our yield, the quality of our product. It's a little bit of a high desert climate environment.
Clearly, we move our flower production to different parts of the country, different parts of the world based on climate change and what temperatures are doing. And in particular, with the droughts in the west of the country, you're keenly aware of that in terms of where you live. But those drought situations are real and changing kind of quickly. And then there's a last mile.
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