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26-year-old production manager leads the way in Checkers’ blooming flower business

MyPR: 26-year-old production manager leads the way in Checkers’ blooming flower business:

26-year-old production manager leads the way in Checkers’ blooming flower business

Tseke Tladi (26) and his team of 27 employees at Freshmark’s Flower Co. packhouse in Johannesburg are responsible for ensuring the flower bouquets at Checkers supermarkets exceed customer expectations this Valentine’s Day.

After graduating with a BSc degree in Agriculture from the University of Free State in 2020, Tladi, originally from Benoni in the East Rand, joined Freshmark as a trainee manager – an opportunity he credits with launching his career. In 2022, Tladi was promoted to production manager, and now leads a team that supplies flowers to Checkers stores nationwide.

“My training helped me to better understand the value chain and how flowers go from farms to customers. There are many aspects to it, which makes my job exciting. From flower auctions to designing bouquets, production and making sure all our flowers arrive fresh in stores every time,” he says.

Established in August 2019, Flower Co. is a department within Freshmark, the Shoprite Group’s procurement and distribution arm for fresh fruit, vegetables and flowers.

The department started with 10 employees in a packhouse located at Multiflora – Africa’s biggest flower auction – in Johannesburg. This is where all Checkers’ fresh flowers and bouquets are packaged and arranged. The packhouse doubled in size almost overnight to 670m2, and was expanded again last year to over 1 000m2. In 2021, another facility was opened in the Western Cape focusing on fynbos production.

Since the department was established, Checkers’ flower sales have grown by over 30% year-on-year. About 95% of the supermarket chain’s flowers are now produced at these two facilities, which also supply the Group’s stores in Namibia, Botswana and Angola.

The business aims to be ahead of the curve by working with suppliers to grow special varieties exclusively for Checkers, such as lollipop roses, which are perfect for Valentine’s Day.

A limited range of bouquets is also available on Checkers Sixty60, so even South Africans abroad can have fresh flowers delivered within 60 minutes to their loved ones at home.

 

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Have you tried: Travelling to South Africa?

Did you know this about Johannesburg? Where Johannesburg got it’s name from: The fledgling town of Johannesburg was laid out on a triangular wedge of “uitvalgrond” (area excluded when the farms were surveyed) named Randjeslaagte, situated between the farms Doornfontein to the east, Braamfontein to the west and Turffontein to the south. The property belonged to the government. The Surveyor-General of the ZAR issued an instruction that the farm be surveyed as a township, consisting of 600 stands measuring fifty feet by fifty feet. The first auction of stands took place on 8 December 1886. The settlement was named after two officials of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR), Christiaan Johannes Joubert and Johannes Rissik, who both worked in land surveying and mapping. The two men combined the name they shared, adding ‘burg’, the archaic Afrikaans word for ‘fortified city’.

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Top Star Drive-In: Destroyed by What Created it

However, the very thing that created the Top Star eventually destroyed it. Because the early miners had used crude methods, the Ferreira Dump—and dozens of others like it—still contained significant traces of gold. As the price of gold rose and new chemical extraction technologies (like the carbon-in-pulp process) made it profitable to “mine the waste,” the ground beneath the Top Star became more valuable than the cinema itself. In 2006, despite fierce opposition from heritage groups who argued that the dump and the drive-in were culturally significant landmarks, the projectors were turned off for the last time.

The reclamation of the dump was a staggering industrial feat. Starting in 2008, mining giant DRDGold used high-pressure water cannons to “monitor” the dump, turning 5 million tons of solid earth back into a liquid slurry. This slurry was then piped 40 kilometers across the province to a processing plant in Brakpan. By 2011, the “mountain” had completely vanished. The 50-meter-high plateau that had dominated the southern skyline for a century was reduced to a flat, dusty crater.

The disappearance of the Top Star is a poignant symbol of Johannesburg’s “extractive” nature. It is a city that consumes itself to stay alive; even its historical landmarks are subject to the fluctuating price of minerals on the London and New York stock exchanges. Today, if you drive along the M2, there is an empty space in the sky where the Top Star used to be. While the reclamation removed a source of toxic dust and “acid mine drainage,” it also erased a piece of the city’s collective memory. The land where the gold-flecked mountain once stood is now being rehabilitated for light industrial use, proving that in eGoli, even the horizon is for sale if there’s enough gold hidden inside it.