The Big 10: Trial by flower

A major rule of business is to always help your product look its best. But when Greg Michalak, trial manager at C. Raker & Sons in Litchfield, Mich., plans for the upcoming trials, he doesn’t worry as much about that.

He’s more interested in showing how the plants deal with reality in the 12 acres of trial gardens he manages.

“We’re really one of the largest in the Midwest that the breeders can use as a place where they can point their clients to and say, ‘Look at this. This is how it’s going to react in your garden,’” he says.

That perspective is part of the core principles of the company and has been in some form since its start, says Susie Raker, general manager of sales and marketing. As a grower, C. Raker sits in the middle of the country, surrounded by farmland and far away from either coast that could provide optimal growing conditions for new plants. That placement gives them an opportunity to show how plants survive in a different environment.

The gardens are half open trial, and half private trials paid for by breeders eager to see how the plant grows in the Midwest. Michalak solicits plant material and gets the gardens started. But they also try to let the plants experience life as they would in any homeowner’s flower beds.

“Everything is treated the same. So if there’s geraniums, for instance, and we deadhead one, we’ll deadhead them all in our trials. That way there’s no favoritism. There’s no one saying, ‘Oh, you need to do this to make our plant look really nice,’” says Michalak.

The plants aren’t left to the wild — there’s regular fertilization, and watering is consistent. But beyond that, they try to treat the plants like any homeowner might.

“We don’t primp them,” says Raker. “I always laugh because breeders will come to us and say, ‘You need to treat this zinna this way.’ And I say, ‘No, we don’t, because the homeowner is not going to do that.’”

Breeders, sales reps and greenhouse growers visit to see how their plants thrive against competition, going from “plug and liner, to a finished pot, to in the landscape, to see how they actually end up.”

And there are more benefits than having that real-world comparison, as well, for Raker. They earn the view as industry experts by putting themselves on the front lines with their trial plants, really only armed with information from breeders that might only work effectively in a particular setting. Regardless of the performance, the experience positions them as growers in the know about each plant’s peculiarities.

Perhaps most important to the bottom line is when a breeder or sales rep visits to check on progress, it’s an opportunity to build that relationship and establish greater credibility.

“The trial gardens themselves show what we can execute as a company,” says Raker. “If we can execute a garden like that with the number of plants and varieties that we’re doing, it helps to instill faith that we’re also able to grow a good plug or liner, and maybe we’re a good home for the product they’ve been trying to find one for.”

Even without a direct way to quantify it, Michalak says the trial gardens lead to more sales, since growers end up talking about current trends and new varieties, looking at trial books and planning the next season to see what’s available.

Sometimes trials don’t mean bringing people directly to the gardens. C. Raker has also made a name for itself in producing small breeder trials that can be shipped out to greenhouses, sales reps, garden centers and garden writers. They started as a company focused on small customers, and had to develop practices for dealing with small orders. It’s not easy, but it can be cost effective, says Raker, even for a company with a minimum order of one plant.

“You have to understand logistics and packaging to be able to do that,” says Raker. “We just took what we had learned through shipping small amounts of young plants to our customers and created a program. We produce a six-pack of their new variety, then package and ship it all over the country.”

To make that happen, they developed close partnerships with FedEx and UPS, working with their engineering to get the shipping containers right the first time. The box designs haven’t changed in 20 years. Their results are no joke, either: Recently, they developed packaging to ship a single poinsettia across the country.

“And we’ve done it successfully,” says Raker.

And the process that got that poinsettia safely to its destination is one of the plans included in the company’s quality system and standard operating procedures. It covers properly picking an order, sowing seeds, sticking cuttings and how to properly pack a box.

“We’re dealing with something living, so we need to make sure it’s done right,” says Michalak. “The easiest way to do that is to have clear policies and procedures that help everyone know exactly what’s expected and what to do.”

But even with practices and focused effort, the trials aren’t meant to bring in profits, says Raker. They’re done at cost.

“It’s ... not a profit center. And the reason we don’t treat it as one is it gives us the ability to get our hands on stuff and get very good intel on how this product operates from a production standpoint so next season when it becomes a regular introduction, we know what we’re doing,” she says.

“We’ve always tried to partner with small- to mid-size customers. And so our operation is built from the ground up to be able to do that efficiently.”