Hawaiʻi Wants Home Cooks To Play A Bigger Role In Growing The State’s Food System
New legislation awaiting the governor's signature would help businesses operate out of home kitchens.
By Thomas Heaton / May 16, 2024
Mark Suiso was left with a glut of green mangoes after high winds battered his West Oahu grove in mid-January, knocking the unripe fruit from his trees.
The owner of Makaha Mangoes tried to salvage the fallen crop, but struggled to find vinegar for pickling or plastic tubs to store it. Everyone else had the same idea.
“I noticed a lot of the food trucks around town were selling pickled mangoes as a side order,” Suiso said. “That’s all coming from home kitchens or cottage industry people.”
Despite struggling to find supplies, Suiso welcomes the competition. As president of Hawaii Tropical Fruit Growers, he wants to see more small operators and farmers producing food for the market. And so do state legislators, who recently passed House Bill 2144 to help budding food entrepreneurs kick-start and scale up food businesses.
The measure would expand the Department of Health’s list of allowable homemade food products and increase the ways they can be sold.
Weekly events like the Upcountry Farmers Market on Maui are typically the only place cottage food producers can effectively sell their food products. (Marina Riker/Civil Beat/2022)
If the governor signs the legislation, entrepreneurs will soon be able to make pickled, fermented or acidified foods such as jams and chutneys to sell online and in stores. Meat and seafood products would still be prohibited.
And they can prepare that food in their home kitchens.
The move is seen as a way to increase food production statewide. Large-scale food processing has been a bottleneck in Hawaii’s food supply chain, largely due to a lack of facilities and investment. Allowing more products to be cooked in home kitchens, producers say, could encourage new enterprises.
And those could graduate into medium-size and larger businesses, using other state-run initiatives such as the new food innovation hubs in Wahiawa and on Maui, said the legislation’s author, Rep. Kirstin Kahaloa.
“If we get people to scale their lilikoi butter or scale aunty’s famous jelly at the farmers market in Kau, that could turn into a really strong made-in-Hawaii product,” Kahaloa said. “That could be sold all over the world.”
Held Back By Existing Rules
DOH food safety regulations have until now been generally too prohibitive and costly for small food businesses and entrepreneurs to adhere to.
The rules were last updated in 2017. DOH declined to comment on the new legislation because it still needs the governor’s signature.
Rourk Reagan’s Pukana La Farms preserves have only been sold at events and farmers markets due to DOH restrictions. HB 2144 could change that. (Courtesy: Rourk Reagan)
The current regulations have seen people like Rourk Reagan in Kau on the Big Island fork out $15 to $50 per hour to rent DOH-approved commercial kitchen space to make jams, jellies and fermented products like kimchi and preserves. Then there’s the need to rent refrigerator and freezer space, gas money and the cost of having products tested for safety.
Because his preserves were not approved under the current rules, Reagan spent hundreds of dollars to have his 31 seasonal flavors tested — which can take months — over the past two years.
“It adds up really quick,” Reagan said.
Hawaii Master Food Preservers Vice President Jane Tai makes fruit leather, which involves some preparation and eight to 12 hours of drying in a dehydrator. If Tai wanted to sell her product through a cafe or retail store, under the current rules, she would have to rent commercial kitchen space to essentially wait for hours as her fruit dried. Tai said that is “why I’m still a very small-time farmers market vendor.”
“There’s a lot of anomalies in there that create very difficult economic hardship for entrepreneurs in the cottage food industry,” Tai said.
And the regulations have limited the sale of these homemade products to farmers markets, other events and direct sales to customers. Reagan enjoys selling at markets, but it becomes a juggling act between finding time to cook and sell his products.
The measure will allow him and other cottage food producers to sell their products online, by phone or through third-party retailers — as long as they are labeled as homemade and have a list of ingredients.
If the legislation becomes law, Reagan will still test his products. But he sees his business growing because he will be using his own kitchen.
Reagan is now thinking about ways to enlarge his business, Pukana La Farms. His plans include buying more industrial equipment or building his own commercial kitchen if things pan out in the next five years.
It will take time for the business to grow, even with the new rules, because “it’s not some tech start-up where someone is like, ‘Oh, I love your idea, here’s 100 grand,'” Reagan said.
“It works well but I also have to have time to cook,” Reagan said. “Unless you have somebody, you can’t do four, five markets a week.”
The rules overseeing the cottage food industry in Hawaii are “quite restrictive” compared to other states, said Meagan Forbes, legislative director and council for The Institute for Justice, which works on cottage food laws nationwide.
The institute has given Hawaii a C grade for its homemade food rules, leaving it at 43rd out of 69 sets of state rules and laws that the organization grades. Wyoming has the highest grade and its 2015 Food Freedom Act allows all home-cooked foods to be sold anywhere with very few regulations.
But the bill’s rule changes, which would have to be implemented by the end of this year, are a good first step, Forbes said.
“I think they wanted to take an incremental approach, slow and steady, to expand it a bit first to see how that goes and then in a couple of years look again and consider expanding it further,” she said.
The end game, according to Rep. Kahaloa, is to foster the growth of smaller businesses such as Reagan’s and develop the rural economy.
Additional Help for Local Ag Ventures
Hawaii’s agricultural economy has been growing when it comes to value-added products, which require some form of processing like being preserved or frozen, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s latest census.
For Hawaii farms that sell value-added products, the total worth of those products jumped from just over $189,000 in 2017 to $237,360 in 2022, according to the USDA.
The numbers show that farmers are making more money and are more directly involved in the market, said Saleh Azizi, director of the Hawaii Food Hub Hui. It also signifies that there is strong demand for local food.
Suiso, of Makaha Mangoes, wants to grow his business to include more products like smoothies or popsicles.
“Can the backyard person, the small farmer, develop some products … let it grow from there? That’s something that we’re hoping to do with our mango business,” Suiso said.
The Wahiawa Value-Added Product Development Center is intended to be a one-stop hub for food entrepreneurs looking to experiment and increase production by using top-of-the-line equipment. (David Croxford/Civil Beat/2024)
That is where the idea of a food and product innovation network comes in. The network would bring together existing and future food innovation centers that could become incubators for food businesses.
The not-yet-formalized initiative is spearheaded by Sen. Donovan Dela Cruz and the Agribusiness Development Corporation.
The network would include the recently opened Maui Food Innovation Center and Wahiawa Value-Added Product Development Center — shared commercial kitchens intended to help entrepreneurs commercialize, innovate and enlarge their operations. The idea is for those businesses to then increase demand for local produce, ultimately diversifying the economy.
Those centers contain equipment that is generally inaccessible to small businesses, such as bottling machines, labelers and devices to ensure products are shelf stable. They also help businesses better market their wares.
Both Dela Cruz and Agriculture and Environment Committee chair Sen. Mike Gabbard have introduced legislation in the past couple of years to inject funding and formalize the network, but have not succeeded.
Kahaloa said her bill was not originally intended to be part of the innovation pipeline, but she considers the concepts “totally aligned.”
“This is at the inception of a business, to get to scale, and then need the food innovation network and beyond, when they’re a strong made-in-Hawaii brand,” Kahaloa said.
“Hawaii Grown” is funded in part by grants from the Stupski Foundation, Ulupono Fund at the Hawaii Community Foundation and the Frost Family Foundation.
Civil Beat’s community health coverage is supported by the Cooke Foundation, Atherton Family Foundation and Papa Ola Lokahi.