How It’s Done: Transporting Fresh Plants

With the most extensive Western Canada delivery network for live plants and products, West Coast Floral has provided customers with quality logistic and transportation services for over 32 years. Shipping everything from pots, soil, garden centre supplies, fertilizer, and of course live plants and cut floral, we are the carrier of choice for hundreds of garden centres, retail chains, wholesalers and distributors, florists and landscapers. With products grown from our greenhouses and products distributed from other suppliers, we ship twice a week during our peak season.

Our shipping network includes 10 distribution centres throughout British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, allowing for easy pick-up for customers in neighbouring towns. We also provide direct delivery to select customers across these four provinces. As our distribution network is so extensive, we also ship for the two largest plant horticulture brokers in the world, delivering 90% of their combined orders in Western Canada. 

DID YOU KNOW?

All our delivery trucks are temperature-controlled
Ensuring our live goods arrive at their destination in the same fresh quality we packed them in, our delivery trucks are set to a fresh temperature of exactly 12.8° Celsius (or 55° Fahrenheit). This allows us to pack a wide assortment of products in each truck including tropicals, succulents, cacti, dried bouquets, and cut floral, without compromising on quality. 

Our delivery packaging comes in four shapes and sizes
We have honed the “art of the box,” taking our previous 12 box shapes and sizes and narrowing it down to our “core four” to efficiently pack everything from plant trays, water-filled buckets for florals, and flat florals and stems. Taking inspiration from traditional assembly lines, and with the help of our handy-dandy box-making machine, we have streamlined the packing process to get our products boxed, into the trucks, and onto the road in record time.

We use a driver tag-teaming system to ensure products are constantly moving. Nonstop
To deliver our products timely and accurately, our drivers use a tag-teaming system, switching who is behind the wheel to drive the long haul. Our dedicated drivers understand the importance of ensuring products are in the hands of our customers by a certain time, and their reliability is what makes our distribution network so extensive and robust. With relationships built between driver and customer over the years, it has created customer loyalty reflective in West Coast Floral’s promise to our customers.