Sarah Langford

When Juliet said of Romeo that ‘a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’, she spoke a common truth. We identify and love flowers by and for their scent. But you will struggle to find many scented flowers for sale in Britain. This is largely because in the 1950s, the UK’s home-grown flower business was flattened by the Dutch government. Huge investment in its domestic flower industry saw the first air-freighted blooms arrive in this country, followed by the ‘Flying Dutchman’ lorries in the 1980s. Today the average Briton spends £28 a year on flowers, up from £8 in 1984, yet 86 per cent of these are imported, most via the Netherlands from Ecuador, Kenya and Ethiopia.

Organised crime has a new focus: high-end food production. The latest victim is Wildfarmed, a UK-based, regenerative flour business co--founded by one half of the band Groove Armada. Last month, 50 tons of its flour were stolen, disguised as a wholesale order for the French supermarket E. Leclerc. In an audacious move, the fraudsters asked for the wording on the bags to be translated into French. Wildfarmed obliged. The 1kg bags – all 50,000 of them – were loaded into containers ready for export. Then they vanished. Wildfarmed’s disco-ball neon branding makes it a surprising target. But the real question is not how anyone hides a haul of hard-to-miss flour bags, but whether this theft is a bellwether.