Another day at the ‘flower factory’

“I had a newfound respect for the industry, and decided I wanted to pursue the work and take over the business one day,” says Harster, now operations manager for the eponymously named enterprise.

The second-generation family company specializes in distinctive and exotic plants for the home and garden, focusing on high sell-through rates and maximizing retail dollars per square foot. Harster’s current 350,000 square feet of undercover growing space encompasses varieties propagated via sophisticated in-house R&D and further advanced through social media surveys of potential customers.

The purely wholesale entity delivers 20 to 25 varieties annually to chain stores including Trader Joe’s, Kroger and Publix. Harster sells to brokers that themselves are connected to chain outlets, while smaller dealers provide the cultivator’s wares to mom-and-pop stores.

A top North American producer of African violets, Harster also grows a “show-stealing” Stephanotis boasting white star-shaped flowers emitting an enticing jasmine fragrance. Crispy wave ferns and mass-produced pilea count as added bounties for a grower that has tripled its revenue over the last five years.

Operations manager Harster points to a younger generation taking to houseplants, much as their older brethren did in the past. The company specifically invests in social media trends garnered from hobbyist communities online.

“We have employees whose sole job is scouting Reddit and algorithms on Google,” says Harster. “We’ll search terms for plants and jump on trends. Or we contact hobby growers directly and see if we can work together to introduce a plant into mass market. Some people say no, but some are excited to get their hard work discovered. They get paid a finder’s fee, and we go from there.”

A family affair

Harster Greenhouses was established in 1976 by Yannick’s father, Andre, a French immigrant who learned the trade with master growers in Holland. Andre immigrated to Ontario to work at a local greenhouse, eventually buying his own hoop house and selling products to French-speaking customers in Quebec.

Yannick joined the business five years ago, bolstered by an MBA in transatlantic trade from a German university and business acumen sharpened during a stint at BMW. In recent years, the outfit invested in automation to move, prepare, pack and ship plants as efficiently as possible. Stepping into Harster’s 15-acre home base is like visiting a veritable “flower factory,” complete with automatic container cleaners operating alongside machines that handle and wrap individual plants.

Harster employs between 150-170 workers during its peak spring season, a figure officials expect to see again this year even without reaching the heights of a coronavirus sales boom that saw plants moving by the cart-full from chains throughout Canada.

The cultivator is developing new products for 2022 and beyond — among them an all-pink Tradescantia aimed at the Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day markets. New double-flowering violets are also on schedule for this year, while Harster’s vertically integrated tissue culture lab is experimenting with a variety of tropical fern.

“We do a lot of investigation in terms of what can work for new crops, but the public always has something they come back to,” head grower Bart Kouwenberg says. “This year, we have a crocodile plant with a leaf that looks like skin. Jasmine is another product we can’t keep up with.”

A future of growth

Harster attributes part of the company’s success to an embrace of technology across all operations. With nearly 50 years in the tissue culture space, the business enjoys a “first-mover advantage” through new product categories created at an off-site lab. Instead of breeding or propagating via cuttings or other techniques, lab engineers harness in-vitro technology to clean, initiate, select and reproduce genetic material.

“This way, we have more control over aesthetic quality, growth cycles and plant hardiness,” Harster says.

Meanwhile, a lab entomology arm allows the company to produce biocontrols — among them nematodes and various predatory insects — that it then applies in its greenhouses. Technicians use laboratory equipment to identify harmful pathogens, providing rapid remediation before an infection can spread.

Harster says, “These aspects of our laboratory’s integration have taken on an even greater importance and value due to the supply chain issues all industries are currently facing. It allows us a degree of self-sufficiency that not many growers benefit from, and we’re fortunate our founders pursued this venture.”

Sustaining the family business

Billing itself as “the green grower,” every facet of Harster’s operations is designed and implemented with stringent environmental stewardship in mind. For instance, all greenhouse plants are fed with recycled rainwater collected by a capture system that spans the entire facility. Accumulated water is oxygenated and stored in an underground reservoir to provide plants only the cleanest refreshment.

Harster greenhouses are powered by solar energy, while the business offers biodegradable pots and planters usable in the home and garden.

“We’re looking at being more green all the time, even with the expense,” says Harster. “We have to get creative with environmentally controlled agriculture, which, for me, is the future of the planet. Eventually, there won’t be enough land to grow food for everyone, so we’ll have self-sustainable vertical farms that are closer to population centers. Hearing about climate change can be a helpless feeling, but we’re doing our small part, and hope that everyone else does the same.”

Harster innovation extends beyond the greenhouse to the marketing side of the industry, including tags and point-of-sale materials that direct customers to in-depth online resources. Various plants sold by Harster even have their own Spotify playlists, a brainchild of a digital marketing team continuously keeping younger plant lovers at the forefront.

“The idea is to treat plants like pets and try to make people appreciate them in a different way than they’re used to,” says Harster. “You can build a story about a plant through tags and display cases, or through industry magazines.”

Centering an innovation-focused strategy has brought a youth movement to the company, which Harster believes sets the enterprise up for continued success in the new year and beyond. Tech-savvy talent is needed to develop a new ERP system for an in-process 150,000 square-foot greenhouse expansion.

“With costs rising and the supply chain out of whack, we’re looking at improving efficiencies and improving dollars per square foot of growing space,” Harster says. “It’s getting hard to find people for this work, so to counteract that, we’re looking for folks who embrace and like exploring technology. People comfortable and familiar with technology tend to be younger, meaning we have a generational shift going on here where our workforce is younger than most places.”

In the coming year, Harster forecasts a return to the trade-show circuit, as well as a renewed global search for new exotic plants. For his part, Harster is thrilled to further strengthen an industry vital to feeding the world at large.

“This is not just professional, but it’s personal, too,” says Harster. “Working in this environment and improving our piece of the industry is going to help in that bigger picture, or at least we hope it does.”

The author is a freelance writer based in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. He can be reached at douglasguth@gmail.com.