Why You Shouldn't Buy Fruit Baskets from a Florist Network There are many popular floral websites that people use to send beautiful and elegant floral arrangements for same day delivery. Some examples of the most popular ones are FTD, Teleflora, and CitiFloral. When you place a floral arrangement order from one of these networks, your order is automatically routed to one of the 10,000s participating local florists that is closest to the person to whom you are sending the flower arrangement. The florist then pulls fresh flowers out of their inventory and in most cases the flowers that are delivered are of the same variety you ordered. When necessary, a florist will substitute a flower variety or two because they don't have the kind you ordered, but will usually include a more expensive or at least comparable arrangement to ensure your satisfaction. In most cases you would never know if the florist delivered something different anyway. At the most you might ask, "How were the flowers I sent you?", and regardless of the condition or variety of the flowers you recipient most certainly say, "They are beautiful." Why You Should Avoid Florist Delivered Edible Arrangements So now let's take another scenario where you decide to send a gift and you go to one of these floral websites because you had a good experience. The flowers were fresh and beautiful and delivered within a few hours of your order. This time as you are browsing the 100s of floral options, you decide to send a fruit basket instead of a floral arrangement. You look at the 12 or so fruit gift basket pictures and base your purchasing decision on the variety of fruit, the selection of gourmet items, and the quality of the basket. As soon as you submit your order it is routed off to a local florist who has no fruit on hand, no gourmet items, and maybe a gift basket or two that they picked up from a thrift store. The florist is given the
picture of the gift and told how much they are going to get paid for delivering your fruit basket purchase. So guess what, the florist is incented to prepare your fruit basket gift as cheaply as possible, because the less they put in to the fruit basket, the more money they keep. Why Would a Florist Agree to Prepare and Deliver Fruit Baskets? When florists join a floral network like FTD or Teleflora, they must agree to prepare the occasional fruit basket that comes to their area of the world. So how does a florist go about preparing a fruit basket? They first find a wicker basket that is hanging around the store and then take a trip to the grocery store to get some fruit. It is important to know that Orchardists reserve the best quality fruit for their own fruit baskets or for export. Foreign markets, such as Japan, will pay much more for quality fruit than the US market. Therefore, the lowest quality fruit is found in the US grocery store, the same place your florist will go to get the fruit for your fruit basket. Florists will also pick up the gourmet items for your fruit gift at the grocery store. If the fruit basket picture had chocolate covered cherries, honey wheat crackers, succulent summer sausage, and garlic cheddar cheese, its quite possible that the florist will include instead Raisinets, saltines, processed cheese slices, and Oscar Meyer sausage. Asking florists to inventory the gourmet items and export quality fruit is impossible because of how infrequently they are asked to deliver a gourmet fruit basket. And remember, what the florist doesn't spend on preparing your fruit basket is what they get to keep. What Alternatives do I have for Fruit Basket Delivery? Even if you love the florist website you use for sending floral arrangements, find a different website to send fresh fruit baskets. Find a fruit basket company who grows, packs, and ships the fruit baskets. Usually you'll find orchardists who have grown fruit for 50 years or more who have decided to branch out and diversify their income. Farming is hard. Competition is fierce in the fruit commodity industry. So if you can find an orchardist who has made the investment to pack and ship fruit baskets, that is your best bet. You'll feel good about helping out a US farmer and you'll get the best and freshest fruit possible. And best of all, the fruit variety, the basket and the gourmet items will actually match the picture you saw on their website!