As you do your shopping this holiday season, you’ve probably noticed the beautiful bouquets of holiday flowers in your local Whole Foods Market store. But a quick look doesn’t give you the whole story. This season, we’ve worked with our growers to bring you three Whole Trade™ Guarantee holiday floral bouquets.*
In addition to their outstanding beauty, these Whole Trade bouquets do more than dress up your home or table. Meet Ana, one of the workers on a flower farm that supplies us with these beautiful flowers. Ana has been working for the farm for seven years. She works in production at the farm, cutting and preparing the flowers for their trip to our stores in bouquets or bunches. Ana and her family live in Facatativa, Colombia. They have benefited from the farm’s foundation, which is providing her son with an education. Read the rest of this entry »
As we head into the full swing of the holidays, many of our stores* will be selling Fraser Fir trees. These tree comes from family operated Bottomley Evergreens & Farms. Here are some of the reasons why we bring these trees to you, and you can check out the video to learn more about the Bottomley’s and their farm.
Our trees are fresh from the Blue Ridge Mountain, grown by family-owned and operated Bottomley Evergreens & Farms.
With a dark green color, aromatic smell, needle retention, shape and fullness, Fraser Firs hold decorations beautifully.
A well-cared-for tree should remain fresh at least three to four weeks!
For every tree cut down, Bottomley plants two more trees the following year.
* Bottomley trees are available in stores in our Mid-Atlantic, Rocky Mountain, Southwest, South, Northeast and North Atlantic regions. Our Midwest and Florida region stores will have small “table top” trees.
Happy Mother’s Day to all you moms out there! Hopefully, many of you were the recipients of your favorite treats today – quite possibly flowers! If you did get flowers and if they have the Whole Trade Guarantee™ seal on them, you can know that they helped support communities and families (and moms!) where they were produced. Here is the story of one mom behind the flowers.
Maria lives in Juan Pablo Sesundo, Colombia and works on a farm producing Whole Trade Guarantee flowers. She has been with the farm for 11 years (and working in the flower industry for 22 years). Maria works the flower beds in the greenhouse, maintains the crop and harvests the flowers. “Every day I come to work with a positive attitude filled with love that makes me want to do my best. Our farm is filled with people who love their job and are very devoted to producing the best and most beautiful flowers that we can,” says Maria.
With Earth Day right around the corner and the talk of “green” in the air, the timing couldn’t be better to share the scoop on our recent trip to check out a certified organic flower producer. On a cool sunny morning last week, five of us from Whole Food Market met excited to tour a Southern California flower grower and gain a better understanding about their organic program. We were not disappointed!
Looking in any direction, the landscape was a visual patchwork of different textures with each crop. The hills and valleys were each a microclimate, creating ideal growing conditions. Eucalyptus and waxflower dominated the landscape with all kinds of treasures (like protea and sunflowers) mixed in. The majority of the crops were South African and Australian natives – certainly less common than a rose or tulip here in the states, but no less beautiful (and in most cases they last two to three times longer than a “typical” flower). Read the rest of this entry »
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Looking in any direction, the landscape was a visual patchwork of different textures with each crop. The hills and valleys were each a microclimate, creating ideal growing conditions. Eucalyptus and waxflower dominated the landscape with all kinds of treasures (like protea and sunflowers) mixed in. The majority of the crops were South African and Australian natives – certainly less common than a rose or tulip here in the states, but no less beautiful (and in most cases they last two to three times longer than a “typical” flower). 
