Interest from leading European Flower producers and buying retailers have lead to establish a technical working group, which has established itself as Technical and Standards Committee for Flower and Ornamentals. In this capacity, the group developed and tested the new normative documents for the EurepGAP flower protocol. All the implementation experience from the Fruit and Vegetable standard could be utilized. Technical input from leading schemes and other relevant grower members provided a good base for a high acceptance of the EurepGAP Flower protocol in the industry. EUREP has announced the group's activities at the Bologna Conference in October 2001 and launched the scheme in Amsterdam on 6th November 2002. First certification bodies have been trained and started certification in the end of 2003. Large schemes have announced their intention to apply for benchmarking, i.e. for official recognition by EurepGAP.