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Oʻahu hotels and restaurants make a written promise to support local farms

Joe Ibarra, vice president and general manager of The Kahala Hotel & Resort, signs the Good Food Pledge.
Casey Harlow / HPR
Joe Ibarra, vice president and general manager of The Kahala Hotel & Resort, signs the Good Food Pledge.

More than a dozen local vendors participated in the Oʻahu Good Food Show this week. The event was put together by the City and County of Honolulu, Oʻahu Visitors and Convention Bureau, Hawaiʻi Tourism Authority and the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement.

Farmers and small businesses used the opportunity to connect with tourism industry professionals — but it was also where more than 20 hotels and restaurants signed the Oʻahu Good Food Pledge.

The written commitment outlines the promise to work with local farmers and use more locally sourced food. Kamehameha Schools, Punahou School, Hawaiʻi Pacific Health and CNHA were among the first to sign the pledge in September 2022.

Both the show and the pledge are part of a larger effort and partnership between HTA and the City and County of Honolulu. Under HTA's Destination Management Action Plan, the show aligns with supporting local agriculture and the Hawaiʻi food industry.

"We wanted to make sure that we get the leaders in the hospitality industry," said Guillaume Maman, the regenerative tourism program manager for the city. "So all the hotels to come here and connect with the farmers to make sure that they know where to buy local food."

Maman told HPR that hotel partners are very enthusiastic to use more locally sourced food, which they see as a win-win for both visitors and residents.

A study from the University of Hawaii's School of Tourism Industry Management found visitors from the continental U.S. are willing to pay more for local ingredients and food.

"Authentic experiences on Oʻahu create once-in-a-lifetime memories for our visitors," said Joe Ibarra, vice president and general manager of The Kahala Hotel and Resort.

"Dining experiences with locally-grown food are essential to truly understanding the unique flavors of our island. I invite my colleagues in the hospitality industry to join us in the Oʻahu Good Food Pledge. Together, we can do great things for the agriculture community," Ibarra said.

However, there are many challenges for local producers to meet the visitor industry's large demand.

"All these [vendors] are small by U.S. standards. So how do they grow? And that's been some of the misalignment challenges that we run across in getting more local [food] into our larger institutions like hotels," said Dexter Kishida, the food security and sustainability program manager for the city.

"A small grower can handle maybe a hundred covers a day for their product, but the hotel needs a thousand," Kishida said.

He suggests one solution could be to integrate a "hyper-regional micro-aggregation", such as the one done by Kahumana Food Hub in Waiʻanae. That way co-ops or hubs can pull produce from multiple local farms to fulfill the needs of a larger order.

Another challenge is timing. Kishida said in order to help local producers meet the demand, there needs to be patience when building out capacity. He cites lettuce as an example. Although it's considered a fast-growing crop, it still takes six weeks for it to be ready for harvest.

As a starting point, the city will be partnering with hotels and restaurants participating in the Good Food Pledge to track their current needs and trends. Kishida said this will provide a baseline for local producers to work up to.

"The thing that we don't want to see happen is the pie of agriculture stays the same size, and we just move pieces around," Kishida said.

"We don't want to pull from bakeries, or pull from schools to feed our hospitality industry. We want that pie to grow and add a few additional slices."

Kishida tells HPR the city will meet with hotel and restaurant partners in three weeks to discuss their baseline needs and trends — in order to give local agriculture producers a better sense of expectations.

Casey Harlow was an HPR reporter and occasionally filled in as local host of Morning Edition and All Things Considered.
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