Mele Kalikimaka

Mele Kalikimaka

By David W. Brown

To tell the history of Hawaiian bread is to tell the history of King’s Hawaiian — if only because Robert Taira, who founded the company, invented Hawaiian bread in the first place.

“Robert had attended culinary school on the mainland, came home to Hawaii and, in the 1950s, founded a little place called Robert’s Bakery in a little town called Hilo, on the Big Island,” says John Linehan, the president of King’s Hawaiian. The young cook had tried Portuguese stone bread, which he really liked, but wanted to improve upon. “Stone bread is a little bit like the sweet bread, but with one major difference: unlike Hawaiian bread, which is as fluffy on the second day as on the first, Portuguese stone bread hardens overnight. Like, really hardens. Pound-nails-with-it hardens, which is where it gets its name.”

Robert wanted to give the bread a longer shelf life, and wanted to do so without additives or preservatives. He succeeded, and Hawaiian bread was born. It was an instant success on the island, and Robert soon outgrew his little store in Hilo. He relocated the business to a bigger place, on King Street in Honolulu, Oahu. (Though it is commonly believed that the name of the company, King’s Hawaiian, is a reference to King Kamehameha, who offered bread to the gods or some such thing, the “King” part of the name simply comes from the street where the company relocated. They were too big by then to keep the name Robert’s Bakery.)

In the 1960s, Hawaiian restaurants and hotels carried King’s Hawaiian bread, and when tourists tried the bread, they had the same reaction we do: They wanted to know what it was and where they could get more of it. On the last day of vacations, the departing visitors would drop by the bakery on King Street and fill bags with the addictive bread. Robert and his wife, Tsuneko, started putting mail order certificates in the shopping bags for the tourists to take with them. The bread, as it turned out, was so popular that the cards started being mailed back to Hawaii from Japan, Latin America, Europe, all over Asia — all over the world. The tourists, now at home and hungry for the best taste of the islands, would order more, and some for their friends too. This meant that some people were gladly paying as much as $50 per loaf because of air freight prices.

“The bread was so popular, in fact, that because of those little mail order certificates, King’s Hawaiian became the biggest customer of the United States Postal Service in the state of Hawaii, and the company was dropping off one or two truckloads of bread to the airport every morning,” says Linehan. Which is how everyone heard about King’s Hawaiian bread.

In 1977, the company opened its first plant in Torrance, California, to better supply the mainland. The bakery, 24,000 square feet in area, is still operating today. In 2003, the company opened a second plant in the California town — this one nearly 100,000 square feet larger than the original. In 2011, the company expanded eastward yet again, opening the first of what would be two plants in Oakwood, Georgia.

Despite its exponential growth — or perhaps because of it — King’s Hawaiian remains a family-owned company, with three generations of the Taira family delivering that irresistible Hawaiian food. Robert’s son, Mark, took over as CEO when he was 26 years old. Like his father, Mark was born in Hawaii, and the company remains devoted to its place of origin.