For a lot of students, the end of the school year means more food insecurity as they lose access to school meals.
Data from the Hawaiʻi Foodbank shows that 1 in 4 keiki in Hawaiʻi will face food insecurity this summer.
The Happy Bento is a lunch service program that serves 27 different Oʻahu campuses throughout the school year.
Deanna Cornelius, the company's founder, recently reached out to HPR, writing, in part, “The Happy Bento … is getting notices almost weekly about things increasing in price. We hate to raise prices because we know that doing so will only affect families' finances more than they already are…”
Cornelius said the service program started at 22 meals a day in 2016, and now they do over 900 meals a day.
"When I first started this business, my goal was not to make a bunch of money. My goal was to expose as many kids as possible to real good food," she said.
She said that exposing children to healthy foods often and earlier will benefit them in the future.
"Even if they go through their teenage years and their 20s deviating from that and eating only what's found in convenience stores, perhaps when they're about 30, or when they start their own families, they naturally return to what they were exposed to when they were very young," she told HPR.
Cornelius shared that the service had received grant money to work with local ʻulu, or breadfruit, growers. However, she told HPR that at the end of this month, $56,850 from that grant will run out because it has been canceled.
The Happy Bento also received another grant through the Child Nutrition Program, which has been cut as well.
"We've provided over 1,000 free meals just in the last school year, and we will continue to do so this summer, but instead of five free meals per school, it's gonna have to be cut down to two. So that's one big way, in my opinion, that these increases in costs are starting to affect real children," she said.
She said that in addition to grant cuts and rising costs, providing raises for her 10 employees has been a challenge.
"I haven't given myself a raise in four years, and don't plan to, because I want to make sure that the good people that I have stay with us, because the good work that we're doing is feeding children, and without them, we couldn't do it," she said.
Cornelius said she's grateful and excited to go to work every day.
"When I get a random phone call from a parent wondering, what are we putting in our purple sweet potato mash? Because when she makes it at home, they won't eat it, but, you know, they love it at school. So when I get a call like that, I just get goose bumps, and I just feel like I'm doing the right thing. I'm doing what I was supposed to do," she said.
This interview aired on The Conversation on May 21, 2025. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Tori DeJournett adapted this story for the web.
