Turning industry strength into business resilience

By The Coffee Shops®.

With horticulture holding onto much of its recent growth, businesses now face the challenge of protecting margins and remaining valuable to customers.

Building a stronger green industry requires collective action, but it also requires individual businesses to make disciplined decisions.

During the State of the Industry presentation at Cultivate 2026 presented by AmericanHort, economist Charlie Hall examined what current industry performance means at the company level.

His central message was neither strongly positive nor negative. Instead, the green industry appears to be maintaining much of the ground it gained in recent years. “We're definitely moving sideways. We're plateauing, and we're maintaining that plateau,” Charlie said. “So, it's not really super good news, but it's far from bad news.”

That environment makes operational discipline increasingly important. Charlie pointed to rising input costs and the potential for margin compression, explaining that businesses have two primary paths: generate sufficient revenue to cover higher costs or find greater operational efficiencies.

That may include examining automation, mechanization and artificial intelligence while taking a closer look at pricing and individual SKUs. “We have to sharpen the pencil. We have to find those operational efficiencies and manage our cost structure,” he said.

Those decisions cannot be separated from the customer. Charlie encouraged companies to clearly understand why customers choose their products and services and what distinguishes their businesses from competitors.

That focus also connects directly to Lionel’s argument that horticulture should communicate its broader value. Charlie identified the health and well-being benefits of plants and green spaces as an important part of the industry’s value proposition. “We as an industry and we as individual companies have to make sure we build in those marketing aspects into everything we do,” he said.

Collective advocacy can help confront industrywide obstacles, but resilience also starts inside individual operations. Together, those approaches offer horticulture businesses a path for managing current pressures while protecting the value they provide.

Visit the AmericanHort website or Watch the full address or Read the transcript.