Community Highlights: Meet Aaron Van Wingerden of Dutch Heritage Gardens

Today we’d like to introduce you to Aaron Van Wingerden.

Hi Aaron, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
My wife, Rozalia, and I started Dutch Heritage Gardens from the group in 2006. The property that we purchased to begin the company had a 3-acre greenhouse facility built on it, however, the previous owners had gone bankrupt two years prior, so it was practically an empty building at the time with no infrastructure.

Our business model was to grow finished “container Gardens” and go after the “do it for me” consumers who did not have the patience to work in a garden planting small plants and cultivating them throughout the growing season. Instead, they could buy one of these Container Gardens with different mixes of plants already in full bloom that they could set outside their front door, or on the back porch or deck, water 2-3 times a week, and enjoy a finished “garden” all season long.

My wife has a great eye for design, and she created many different and unique combinations in different-sized containers with different colors and textures that would appease any color palate a consumer may have. We decided to go after the grocery stores as our customer base because they have the daily foot traffic and our continuer gardens outside the front doors would create a perfect place for the “impulse purchase” we were marketing with our products.

We loaded up 30-40 different combinations with prices ranging from $9.99 all the way up to $99.99 in the back of our Van and drove to multiple different grocery store locations and showed off what we had to the floral managers to see if they had an interest in purchasing from us.

After the 3rd day, the floral buyer for King Soopers (owned by Kroger) called me and told me to come up to his office in Denver to show him the combinations, as he was the one who did all the purchasing for the stores, not the individual floral managers. I drove up and met him the next day and showed him what we had to offer and he gave me orders for the next growing season right then and there for a number of our products.

The first year we sold $800,000 worth of plants to King Soopers and now this coming season we will sell over $10,000,000 worth of plants to King Soopers as well as several other grocery store divisions owned by Kroger in the surrounding states. Our facility now encompasses 20 acres of growing space, we have 50 full-time employees and another 45 season employees that we bring on during our busiest time of year, February through July.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Like all businesses, we have experienced struggles and difficulties during our 17 years in business. Just a few of the things we have experienced are:

Being that we grow flowers – we are a very Weather dependent industry, so if the weather is bad (i.e. snow, hail, rain, etc.) during the peak selling months of April through June then our sales suffer, sometimes to the point of making or breaking the entire year as a whole.

Plants are a “luxury” purchase for most consumers, so if the economy is bad and people need to cut back on spending, flowers are usually one of the things that get cut from people’s budgets. Having Key employees needing to be terminated due to violations of company policy.

The county where our business is located (Douglas County) is not very greenhouse “friendly” and we have struggled to get permitting with each expansion we needed to do of our facilities, as our business has grown. It took us years to get approval for each expansion, with very high permitting costs, as well as other ancillary things the county would make us pay for.

Navigating the political landscape of the Corporate world of Kroger:

When we first started selling to King Soopers 17 years ago, all the buying was done out of a local office, from a person who lived in CO. Same held true with the other divisions of Kroger-owned grocery chains – local buyers for each market. 3 years ago Kroger decided to consolidate all of these positions to their main headquarters in Cincinnati.

The “Floral Category Managers” as they are known, is a stepping stone for most Kroger managers on a path to something different or higher up in the company. In the past 3 years, our company has had to deal with 9 different managers who make the purchasing decisions. Where in years prior when the decisions were made by a local buyer – we had the pleasure of doing business with the same buyer for 13 straight years, until his retirement.

Banking challenges. Being that we grow and sell live goods, it is very difficult to secure funding from the banking industry, as our industry is considered very high risk in the banking world.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Dutch Heritage Gardens?
We are a 20-acre greenhouse facility that grows flowers, bedding plants, and potted crops. Anything you would plant in your garden or use to decorate your front porch or back deck, we grow. We also grow Hardy Chrysanthemums for Fall and Poinsettias for the Christmas Holidays.

We specialize in finished container combo gardens, for the consumer who does not have the time to garden or does not have a garden at all. These finished container gardens under our brand “Impressions” have a mix of plants with different colors, textures, shapes, and sizes to satisfy any flower palette. Consumers simply need to water 2-3 times a week and enjoy their own “mini garden” all season long.

Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
We have had bad luck over the years of partnering on different projects with some really bad characters that didn’t show their true colors until much later in the partnership. The phrase “Money makes people funny” rings true.

However, through all those issues, my wife and I have remained constant in our partnership with our main flower business and have pushed through the issues to continue on better and stronger than before each time.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.DHGardens.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dhgardens/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dhgardens/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@dutchheritagegardens2500

Image Credits
Mary Lynne Ashley