Transparency about sustainability in the supply chain of flowers and plants is becoming more and more important. On the one hand, this is the result of the awareness in society about sustainability. On the other hand, (future) legislation and regulations also require further transparency about the origin and composition of floricultural products and the way in which production and trade are conducted. Floricode supports companies in the supply chain by managing the master data on the certification of growers and other companies and by developing the standards for sharing sustainability data digitally.
Certificate register
Floricode manages the central certificate register for floriculture in cooperation with all important certification bodies worldwide. This register holds data about the existing certifications that a company in the supply chain of flowers and plant has including the validity of these certificates. The register also contains data about the different sustainability certificates that are issued to companies by GlobalGAP, MPS, Fairtrade, KFC, Florverde, and more (15 organisations in total). By now, the register contains data from 4500 different companies, in particular growers of flowers and plants, with about 9500 currently valid certificates. On the basis of these data, Floricode determines whether a company complies with the criteria of the Floriculture Sustainability Initiative (FSI).
Because Floricode centrally manages and distributes the master data on the certifications of floriculture companies, every party in the supply chain possesses the same data; this means that there is no ambiguity about whether or not a batch of flowers or plants has been produced sustainably or whether it has been traded with the correct sustainability logo. The certificate register is also used in the trading systems of the auctions (auction clock, intermediary trade, Floriday) and the purchase and selling systems of the affiliated trading companies. More information about access to the certificate register can be found here.
Exchange of sustainability data through the supply chain
The increasing demand for transparency about sustainability leads to the need to exchange more and more data about the way in which floriculture products are produced and traded in the supply chain. This need arises from legislation and regulations about sustainability and the demands from retail and consumers. Specifically, there is the EU legislation about the use of plastics and other materials for the packaging of flowers and plants which plays mainly in Germany and the UK, but also with the Dutch Packaging Waste Fund.
This development has impacted the exchange of information in the floriculture supply chain. The CSR and Data/IT departments of the trading companies and Royal FloraHolland struggle with the issue of how to organise and secure this in the supply chain. As a first step, it was decided to commission a team of specialists to design an architecture for the exchange of sustainability data in the floriculture supply chain with which, as a follow-up step, the short-term goal of exchanging packaging data can begin to be realized.
The architecture deals with the exchange of data describing the sustainability of a product, an offered batch, a delivery or a company. The architecture concerns any form of sustainability data. More specifically, we focussed on the type of sustainability data that are currently of interest in the supply chain, namely:
- data about packaging (pot, sleeve, tray) of floriculture products
- data about sustainability certificates of floriculture products
- data about the footprint of floriculture products
- data about the applied substrate (in particular peat) in floriculture products
The design of this architecture was carried out as a project from November 2022 up to and including April 2023.
As a result of this project, the following documents are available (Dutch only): see the Dutch page.