Hawaiian offers a bittersweet aloha to a beloved longtime bakery.
Love’s Bakery will close at the end of March, after the COVID-19 pandemic brought the operation to its knees, SFGate reports.
The bakery has been spreading love since 1851 and first shot its ovens more than a century before Hawaii became the 50th state.
The mainstay in Honolulu employs 231 people – all of whom will lose their jobs – and typically distributes about 400,000 loaves to 1,800 customers each week, the website reports.
Demand for bread has been lower during the pandemic, with hotels and restaurants closed. Increased local competition has apparently also taken a big slice out of Love’s dough.
According to Loves, Loves said it was “seriously criminal” with the rent payments, and has already spent $ 2.8 million he received on federal COVID-19 relief loans to maintain the payroll.
“We have worked diligently to cut expenses, maintain our market share and rectify our operational problems, but under the current business environment we are no longer able to continue,” the company said in a statement to the media. . .
The geographical isolation of Hawaii also contributed to the misery of the bakery.
“COVID-19 has also had a major impact on many of our mainland suppliers causing delays in the ingredients and replacement parts for our aging bakery equipment,” his letter from the Federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) and the Hawaii Dislocated Workers said. Act notice said. “With the decline in revenue and the increasing expenses to keep a bakery going, we have made the difficult decision to discontinue the operations as a faltering business.”
When Love’s Bakery kneaded its first loaf 170 years ago, King Kamehameha III was on the Hawaiian throne.
Love’s homemade operations expanded rapidly during the world wars and by 1943 the company was baking bread for 24 hours in a 144-foot oven that put out 8,000 loaves per hour, SF Gate said.
By 1945, it reportedly flew the bread by charter plane to neighboring islands as Hawaii’s population grew rapidly.
Businesses across the country and the world have been struggling to make bread since the pandemic closed trade. More than half of U.S. businesses forced to close, according to one study, will never reopen.