Costa Nursery Farms Expands
Marketing Plan
By Georgia Tasker, Miamiherald.com
Some 185,000 orchids were blooming in a Costa Nursery Farms' shade
house in Goulds, from which thousands were selected for delivery to
stores around the southeastern United States. Among them were
miniature Phalaenopsis orchids, with quarter-sized flowers in
colorful ceramic pots.
Smaller and cheaper than regular Phalaenopsis plants (they sell for
$9.99 to $12.99), these orchids are meant to be impulse buys, ready
to be given as gifts or grown in a windowsill -- and to pull
customers into the garden departments of big box stores like Home
Depot.
''We're putting a lot of thinking into how to make the end user feel
like they can afford something and get a lot for their money,'' says
Charlie Acevedo, vice president of sales and marketing for Costa
Nursery Farms, which is headquartered in Goulds.
Costa is coping with today's tough economic times by aggressively
pursuing new and younger gardeners via YouTube and MySpace. It has
adopted a multipronged marketing campaign put together by Acevedo,
who worked for many years with Anheuser-Busch, and Marta Garcia, who
worked in international marketing for Bacardi.
OXYGEN GENERATORS
Reviving a push from the 1980s, it has started an ''O2 for You''
campaign that touts certain plants' ability to remove pollutants
from indoor air, promoting their use in dorm rooms and hospitals.
Plant studies done in the late 1980s showed that peace lilies and
other plants remove benzene, formaldehyde and trichloroethylene from
the air. But the effort to market plants as indoor air cleaners
fizzled, said Garcia. Now, with sustainability and the environment
in everyone's consciousness, it's time to revive the campaign.
The nursery also has jumped on the edible plant bandwagon with
herbs, tomatoes and strawberries packaged in windowsill planters.
New fern products are being given slick new tags and names, such as
Diva and Rasta. Succulent dish gardens are increasingly popular.
Beginning this month, Costa is opening a joint venture with a
Taiwanese orchid company, United Orchids. The company is selling
tiny orchids from Taiwan to Costa Farms Nursery for ''finishing'' --
growing to salable size -- in eight to ten weeks. Costa, in turn, is
renting land to the Taiwan company, which has built the 4-acre
expandable aluminum greenhouse to handles hundreds of thousands of
orchids.
Because of such marketing initiatives begun last year and new
growing techniques, Acevedo says the nursery has not seen a slowdown
in sales, a claim that could not be verified since the company is
privately held and its records are not public. But the new
directions Costa's marketing is taking are instructive as wholesale
growers struggle to keep decorative plants on consumers' shopping
lists.
AMONG TOP FIVE
Costa is a $230 million business and its companies combined ''are
probably among the top five in the state in relation to foliage and
color sales,'' said Jennifer Nelis, director of public relations and
marketing for the Florida Nurserymen, Growers and Landscape
Association. Greenhouse Grower magazine, an industry voice, lists
Costa as No. 4 of its top 100 nurseries in the United States.
The company began in 1961 on 30 acres off a south Miami gravel road
when Jose Costa began to farm winter tomatoes. Looking for a summer
crop, Costa found calamondin oranges, then moved into year-round
foliage plants, such as corn plants and dieffenbachias.
Today, Costa has facilities in Asheville, N.C., and Pipersville,
Pa., along with farms in the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica, as
well as 1,700 acres in South Florida. It keeps computerized daily
records of sales in each store where its products are sold to
determine buying patterns, says Maria Costa Smith, granddaughter of
the founder, who oversees production of 1,500 to 1,800 different
lines of colorful plants. Using such information, growers can detect
trends and plan growing space, she said.
Costa has a new two-acre trial garden in its research and
development department, where new seeds provided by plant breeders
such as Ball Horticulture and Syngenta are grown under Florida's
conditions. Now being tested, for example, are 36 varieties of New
Guinea impatiens. Costa wants to know which colors bloom at the same
time in order to have multiple colors available in garden centers.
Costa is also searching for ways to cut its costs. When fuel costs
spiked last summer for example, the company switched from using vans
to more fuel-efficient all-terrain vehicles to move plants from farm
to farm. Staff members were trained to load plants onto carts with
the labels facing the same direction so that the shipping crew
doesn't have to spend time doing that -- a step that saved enough
time to enable the company to move two people into other jobs.
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