Petal to the metal: Inside the rise of India’s flower industry
It’s been like blooming spring. Exports have shot up, new states are cashing in. The pandemic proved to be a turning point, as apps began to play a role too.
That ad about ordering a single rose on Blinkit? It tells an intriguing story.
It’s a tale of a digital India, states awash in lucrative blossoms, growing new markets — and a booming, if relatively new, Indian flower industry.
The industrial flower complex in India is only about as old as liberalisation.
“We have an ancient bond with flowers, of course. But until the 1990s, the growing was limited to small patches, or the backyards of homes,” says KV Prasad, director of the Directorate of Floricultural Research (DFR) of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), Pune.
This was the source of garlands and wedding decoration, wreaths and pooja material.
Where they were not available in the volumes required, communities brought them forth in other forms: rangolis and mehendi, sketches and wall art.
Then liberalisation rolled away the barriers to trade. The New Policy on Seed Development had already begun promoting the idea of flowers as a global commodity, in 1988. India has since gone from cultivating flowers across about 35,000 acres in the 1990s to about 704,250 acres today, Prasad says.
Over the past decade alone, volumes have boomed, from 1.65 million metric tonnes (MT) of loose flowers and about 484,000 MT of cut flowers in 2014-15 to 2.28 million MT of loose flowers and 940,000 MT of cut flowers in 2023-24, according to data from the Economic Survey and the Centre’s Department of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare.
Brexit, which took effect in February 2020, aided the boom. With imports into the UK now far more expensive from their traditional supplier, the Netherlands, that market looked East, and India emerged a key supplier.
New digital flower-trading platforms are helping turn flowers into an impulse buy too, thus offering growers and traders new avenues into the domestic market.
More states have been cashing in. In the 1990s, most commercial blooms were funnelled through the capital (Ghazipur in East Delhi has the biggest flower market in India, and processes blooms from Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir and Uttarakhand too), Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. These regions had the right climatic conditions, but perhaps more crucially, this is where key transport hubs were.
After liberalisation – amid a growth in demand, help from government schemes, and technological partnerships with countries such as the Netherlands and Israel – new hubs emerged in Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal.
Still newer ones are emerging now, in Mizoram, Assam, Meghalaya and Odisha.
Mizoram, for instance, recently exported its first anthurium consignment, of 1,008 blooms, to Singapore, via the Zo Anthurium Growers Cooperative Society in Aizawl.
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The menu options haven’t changed much.
The most in-demand loose flowers (sold without the stalk) remain the rose, chrysanthemum, marigold, tuberose and jasmine. These form the backbone of the industry, Prasad says.
Popular cut flowers (sold with the stalk) include the rose, gladiolus, tuberose, chrysanthemum, carnation and orchid.
The Indian floriculture industry also trades in dried flowers, potted plants, nursery plants, seeds, bulbs and cut foliage. The core client list hasn’t changed much either: hospitality, event planners, retail buyers, and the pharmaceutical and perfumes and essences industries.
What has changed are the business models. And, interestingly, the pandemic, initially devastating to the sector, proved to be a turning point.
As traditional avenues dried up, with hotels and airports shut, office buildings shuttered and weddings and other events minimised, retail sales became an urgent priority.
Puja material was still needed, and bouquets could still be sent out as gifts. People weren’t spending on much so perhaps they might spend on blossoms to beautify the home.
With this in mind, entrepreneurs launched flower delivery and subscription start-ups such as Hoovu, The Farmerr and Flower Lab (all founded since 2019).
These platforms typically tie up directly with growers, thus achieving economies of scale while offering a niche, perishable product prone to fluctuating demand at the retail level. To help boost margins, each digital platform typically aims to establish a USP.
Hoovu positions itself as a purveyor of fresh, traditional flowers for poojas. Farmerr and Flower Lab focus on seasonal and exotic blooms, and offer subscription models.
By 2023, Blinkit and Swiggy Instamart were part of the chain, delivering to the doorstep too. By 2024, so was Zepto. These apps position flowers in categories such as “Gifting” and “Everyday purchases”.
Certain blooms (roses and marigolds, mainly) are sourced directly from farmers and kept in stock at depots. Other orders are met through tie-ups with local florists and wholesalers.
Preparations for the big days — Valentine’s Day, Holi, Diwali — start months in advance. “We get our produce directly from farmers. By November, if you don’t speak to them then you’re totally dependent on the market vendors who will give you roses at a random arbitrary price,” Instamart FnV (or fruits and vegetables) director Manish Chawley notes, on the company blog Swiggy Diaries.
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Most flowers, of course, are still sold through the traditional route of farm to wholesale market to retail flower market, local florist or garland maker.
Some enter the cold chain and begin their journey overseas, to the US, Netherlands, UAE, UK and Canada.
Why the Netherlands, one might wonder?
For about 200 years, this country’s Royal FloraHolland auction house has played a critical role in importing and re-exporting 40% of the world’s flowers, conducting quality checks and processing. Doing, essentially, what Belgium does for diamonds.
Except, diamonds last forever. At the flower market, time is everything.
So the Royal FloraHolland operates through a kind of reverse auction: prices start high and drop until a buyer bids. Hundreds of thousands of transactions are conducted daily. They help determine pricing in markets around the world.
Blooms from India and Sub-Saharan Africa as well as from across Europe and the US make their way there, says Nikhila Vaagdevi Anumala, scientist at the National Research Centre for Orchids in Sikkim, run by ICAR.
Flowers exported from India typically reach these destinations within two to seven days. Trade occurs year-round, with peak seasons being Valentine’s Day, the Christmas-New Year week, the various wedding seasons and, apparently, Mother’s Day.
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India, a bit sadly, still makes up only about 0.40% of the global exports market, notes a 2021 study published in the Journal of Horticultural Science and Biotechnology.
Anumala, a lead author on the study paper, says the industry remains relatively unorganised. “Indian flowers often fail to meet international quality standards due to lack of efficient standardisation checks. The absence of integrated cold chain management, coupled with transport delays and dependency on middlemen, results in post-harvest losses,” she adds.
Meanwhile, imports remain more than twice as high in value as exports.
India exported produce worth $86.62 million in 2023-2024 and imported blooms worth $198.94 million, shows data from APEDA (the Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority).
In some good news, revenue from exports has grown many times over, from only $1.34 million in 1987-88 and $24.27 million in 1999-2000.
But India can do much better, says Praveen Sharma, a floriculture consultant and president of the Indian Society of Floriculture Professionals (ISFP).
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One hurdle to doing better is, of course, the climate crisis.
Across the board, “aromas and colours are likely to be affected first,” says Sharma. “We are looking at a potential dip in volumes and quality of produce overall, as well as disruptions to blooming cycles.”
Anil Sharma, COO for retail and franchising at the gifting and bouquets platform FNP (Ferns N Petals), says roses and marigolds are already being affected.
“Extreme temperature fluctuations have impacted bloom size and colour vibrancy. Similarly, unpredictable rainfall has disrupted marigold production,” he adds. “Growers are adapting with better greenhouse technology and irrigation systems, but climate unpredictability remains a key challenge.”
These have been good years for the industry. But climate-focused floriculture research could use more institutional support and funds, says Anumala of ICAR’s National Research Centre for Orchids. “We also need to improve cold-storage and supply chain management in newer hubs like the north-east, so that we can tap into them as the climate in more traditional hubs heats up.”
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