Kalamazoo Shipping Warehouse Opens
March 19, 2008 
Just in time for spring, the Kalamazoo Flower Group’s new crossdocking facility is open and ready for business. We got a behind-the-scenes look last week.
Kalamazoo Flower Group is a subsidiary of the Kalamazoo Valley Plant Growers Cooperative. About half of the cooperative’s members are selling plants through the Kalamazoo Flower Group. These growers include 21 co-op members and nine contracted outside growers, representing 147 acres of greenhouse production.
The new central loading facility opened in Comstock Commerce Park with 38,000 square feet of loading area, 20 dock doors and 2,000 square feet of offices. The group made the commitment to build in August, and ground was broken in September with the goal of being open early March.
This week, growers were excited to be the first to have their carts of flowers cross the new cement. The first shipments went to Missouri.
Pictured are the Kalamazoo Flower Group’s Chief Financial Officer Sharon Wolverton, who has been with the Kalamazoo growers for more than 20 years, and Bill Stephenson, who leads sales to independent retailers.
Wolverton assigns growers their crops and makes sure they go to the right place on the right truck. Product is grown and sold in cart quantities. The carts then come to the new facility to be loaded onto trucks.
The gains in efficiency on the grower side have been huge. Before having this new facility, trucks visited multiple greenhouse operations to load. Even shelves on a cart were loaded by multiple greenhouse operations.
The new system has resulted in more focused growing and a reduction in the number of SKU’s or individual products a grower would be producing. The group still has the flexibility to deliver just a shelf of product to a retailer but that is more the exception than the norm. Most orders are in full or half-cart increments.
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