Can you Use a Regular Refrigerator for Flowers?
Flowers awaiting customer purchase require a favorable environment to retain their quality and freshness. A typical household refrigerator or commercial cooler may seem like a convenient solution for storing floral bouquets, but this will quickly become a problem when flowers wilt and die. Flowers require a constant temperature range, slow continuous fresh air flow, and high humidity to keep their bright blooms fresh and fragrant. Food storage refrigerators are designed with low humidity and fast air flow to prevent food and beverage spoilage, which quickly dehydrates flower blooms, leading to expensive loss of revenue when flowers go unsold. Regular refrigerators cannot compete with the decades of engineering and design that floral coolers have to perfectly replicate the ideal environment flowers arrangements require.
Why a Floral Cooler is Best for Your Grocery Store
A floral cooler is a revenue boosting asset designed to give your business both an eye-catching display and an ideal storage environment for fresh flower bouquets. While a grocery store already has commercial coolers and refrigerators, using these for flower storage may actually cause a loss in profits. Flowers become dehydrated and wilted far quicker in these spaces than in a unit designed to maintain a suitable environment for their delicate needs. Floral coolers are designed to maintain temperatures between 38 and 42°F, and keep a relative humidity between 80 and 90% which elongates the lifespan of the inventory and minimizes wasted unsold flowers.
How do Florists keep Flowers Fresh?
The floral department at the grocery store and the florist’s floral shop have one thing in common: they know how to keep flowers fresh. There are several factors that can affect how quickly a flower starts to wilt. First, they add essential nutrients to the flower’s water source, while keeping certain varieties separate so they don’t compete for nutrients. The water supply is also kept clean and fresh to prevent disease and green bacterial slime from developing. Finally, they keep their flowers in a clean, cool, high humidity storage space with proper ventilation and constant fresh air flow. This may seem like a daunting task but with the correct floral cooler, maintaining floral arrangements in a grocery store is a breeze.
How does a Floral Cooler Improve Flower Sales
Grocery stores and supermarkets are the convenient answer to a customer’s need to find a one-stop shape for all their retail needs. If one of those needs is a bouquet of flowers for a hostess gift, a table centerpiece, or just to brighten someone’s day, the grocery store is usually on the way or already on their errands list. Customers want a variety of fresh and vibrant choices to select the perfect flowers for the occasion.
A floral cooler display case with LED lights will illuminate all of the shelves, perfectly lighting up its inventory. Adjustable glass shelves create the convenience needed to keep up with the demand of different size floral arrangements. Top to bottom glass doors offer the customer a close up inspection of their choices without the requiring the doors to remain open causing the drastic change in temperature and humidity.
How much does a Floral Cooler Cost?
A well-designed floral cooler engineered to create and maintain the proper environment for flower bouquets and arrangements requires an upfront expenditure, however when considering the savings on inventory and increased sales, the difference more than pays for itself. Powers Equipment offers self closing door options in both double swinging or dual sliding doors that are competitively priced. The swinging door option provides customers with a larger opening, however it takes up aisle space and briefly lets out cooler air disrupting the humidity. A sliding door mitigates the air and humidity loss making it the most economic option, but the interior is less accessible to patrons.
What Accessories Can You Get for Your Floral Cooler from Powers Equipment
While upgrading to a floral cooler in a grocery store for storing and displaying fresh flower bouquets will certainly be seen in the revenue savings, adding a few small accessories will boost sales and bring customers back again and again.
Glass or mirrored side panels and durable easy to clean glass shelving adds an elegant touch to any floral cooler display case in a high traffic area. Adding vertical LED lighting makes the flowers’ colors extremely vibrant, grabbing the attention of anyone passing by. Extra hanging bouquet systems or a step display are the perfect solution for adding real estate to the display.
While not the first accessories that come to mind, features like door locks for extra security, larger evaporator coils, remote condensing units, and heated doors are also available and provide extra convenience and efficiency to the daily maintenance of a supermarket’s floral department.
Whatever you’re looking for, the experts at Power Equipment are excited to work with you to design your own customized floral cooler. Call 1-800-673-7868, email sales@powersequipment.com or complete the Contact Us form and brighten up any grocery store with flowers today!