Wholesale Roses: How to Choose Origin, Stem Length and Variety

Wholesale roses are chosen on four things: origin, stem length, variety and the freshness of the delivery. The list price depends mostly on origin and length, while your profit depends on how well those four match the bouquets your customers actually buy.

Wholesale roses by origin: how they differ

The origin on the label tells you what to expect from the head, the stem and the time the rose spent travelling. Within one country the spread is wide too: farms, varieties and how the batch was stored at the wholesaler change the picture. So the table below is a first guide, not a promise. Prices are shown relative to each other, because in euros they move with the season, the exchange rate and the market. Check your wholesaler's list for the week you buy.

How the journey from each country works, and why transit times differ, is covered in flowers from Holland, Ecuador and Kenya. For buying, remember the short version: Ecuadorian roses for impact and size, Kenyan roses for volume at a sensible price, locally grown roses for freshness. Colombia is better known to florists for spray roses and carnations than for single-stem roses.

Stem length and rose prices

On a wholesale list the same rose from the same farm appears on several lines: 50, 60, 70, 80 cm. Each extra 10 cm usually adds noticeably to the stem price, and for long Ecuadorian roses the gap between 60 and 90 cm can be large.

Choose the length for what you make, not for what looks good in the supplier's box:

A simple test: look in your florist's bin at the end of the day. If it is full of 20–30 cm offcuts, the shop is paying for length nobody sees. Switching to a rose 10–20 cm shorter for boxes and small bouquets is one of the fastest ways to cut your purchase bill without losing anything visible. Other ways to avoid overpaying at the wholesaler are covered in wholesale flowers.

Spray roses wholesale

A spray rose is one stem with several heads, usually three to eight, of different sizes and at different stages of opening. It is sold per stem, in bunches. One stem takes the place of several single roses in an arrangement, so spray roses help wherever you need volume and the customer's budget is modest.

What to keep in mind when buying:

• The heads do not open at the same time. That is good for an arrangement meant to last a week and bad for a display: after three or four days a fresh bud sits next to a spent one. The florist has to remove spent heads in time.
• Count the price per head, not per stem. A stem with six heads at the same price beats a stem with three, even if it is shorter.
• Fragility. Side buds break easily during arranging and transport, so the stems should be packed tightly in the supplier's box, without kinks.

Many spray varieties come from Kenya, Colombia and Ecuador, and local greenhouses grow them too. Garden and peony-style spray roses cost more and sell slowly outside the wedding season, so florists usually order them for specific jobs.

How to choose rose varieties for your shop

A wholesaler's list carries dozens of varieties, and choosing from photos is pointless: every rose looks fresh in a picture. A variety for regular buying is chosen by how it behaves in your shop.

The core of almost any florist's range is red, white, cream and two or three pinks. Red is for Valentine's Day and declarations, white and cream for weddings and neutral occasions, pink for birthdays and everyday gifts. Bright, bicoloured and unusual shades give the display character but sell more slowly, so buy them in small quantities.

How to test a new variety:

1. Take one bunch. Put some stems in a vase in the shop and some in the cooler.
2. Note every day how the head opens, whether petal edges darken, whether the neck bends.
3. On day five to seven, compare with the variety you buy regularly.
4. If the newcomer holds up as well and customers like it, add it to your buying for a month and compare waste.

Record variety names together with the origin and the farm: the same variety from different growers can behave differently. That knowledge is not in any general reference. It builds up only in your own notes.

Vase life: what to check when wholesale roses arrive

A rose's vase life is mostly decided before it reaches you: how many days it travelled, at what temperature, how it was kept at the wholesaler. Some of that is visible on delivery, and it is best to return damage straight away, with the driver present.

What to check when you open the box:

• The head. Squeeze it gently: a fresh head is firm and springy, a soft one is old or was kept too warm.
• Outer petals. Dark edges on one or two guard petals are normal and get removed. Spots and grey mould inside the head are botrytis, and that batch goes back.
• The neck under the head. If the head droops and does not lift after water, the rose will not sell.
• Leaves and stem. Black spots, slime at the cut, limp leaves are signs of a long or warm journey.

After that, vase life is in your hands: recutting, clean buckets, fresh water and a cooler at +2 to +8 °C. The details are in storing cut flowers.

How many roses to order for Valentine's Day and Mother's Day

There is no general answer, and any per-shop figure would be made up. The guide is your own sales: how many roses went in an ordinary week and how many in last year's peak week.

Say your shop sells 300 stems in an ordinary week, sold 1,200 in last year's Valentine's week, and ran out of red by lunchtime on 14 February. A sensible plan for this year could be 1,100–1,200 stems as a pre-order at a fixed price (core red, white and pink), plus another 200–300 stems bought from the cash-and-carry or the flower truck during the peak week, once you can see how sales are going. Mother's Day is a quieter rose day in most shops, with more mixed bouquets, so plan it on its own figures.

A pre-order for a specific shipment is almost always non-returnable. Put only what sells for certain on it, and leave trial varieties for top-up buying. If you have no sales history from last year, start more carefully and keep an arrangement with a second supplier. A full plan for the peak week, covering buying, staff and display, is in our guide for a Valentine's Day flower shop.

Choosing wholesale roses in a wholesaler's catalogue

You can call the sales rep and ask whether there are white Ecuadorian roses at 60 cm and how many bunches are left, but by Friday that turns into a dozen calls. It is easier when the wholesaler shows all this in its catalogue.

That is how wholesaler websites on the Petala platform work: the catalogue filters by shipment, country, stem length and colour, and search suggests products as you type. A trade customer who has logged in sees their own contract price. Roses still in transit carry their arrival date and can be reserved before they land. You can try the filters on the demo wholesaler website.

If your wholesaler has no online catalogue, ask for the weekly list as a spreadsheet and sort it yourself by origin, length and colour before you call. Keep your own short list of the varieties you buy regularly, with the farm and the bunch size next to each, so the call takes two minutes instead of twenty.