Ecuador’s roses go velvet and rainbow to win young buyers

Ecuador is the world’s third biggest exporter of roses, and it is trying to stay that way by reinventing what a rose can look like. The palette now runs from white to black, with effects meant to pop on a phone screen as much as in a living room. Some roses are sold with petals that gleam. Others come as a single flower where each petal carries a different color, a rainbow compressed into something you can hold between two fingers. Those rainbow effects require a process that uses a non-toxic chemical that is still invasive to the flower. Even here, innovation has a cost.

At Mystic Flower, a rose farm and post-harvest operation in Cayambe near Quito, these changes extend the longstanding principle Ecuadorian growers follow: adapt as the market evolves. The challenge is that the market is shifting not only in taste but also in trade regulations.

Jhon Jiménez, post-harvest operations manager, describes the shift toward non-traditional roses as driven by younger generations. “The new generations are more focused on this, on the non traditional,” he told EFE, referring to colors “that do not exist naturally in cultivation and could not, eventually, be produced.”