������Ƶ

After failing for years to hire a contractor to construct a highly specialized food processing and preservation facility in Whitmore Village, the Agribusiness Development Corp. is on the cusp of finding a new outfit to do the work.

The $5.5 million-plus facility will be part of the 34-acre , a project worth tens of millions of dollars.  

The food hub will also include the Department of Education’s long-awaited centralized kitchen that will serve thousands of schoolchildren across Oahu. The DOE is in the final stages of signing a $28 million contract to build the kitchen.

Taken together, the hub will be a blueprint for other islands and will help reinvigorate Hawaii’s agriculture economy, some legislators have said.

One of the industry’s challenges is that processing facilities are typically too expensive for Hawaii’s food businesses to invest in.

Plans call for the hub to include a high pressure processing facility, which will include office space, cold and dry storage areas and two high-pressure processing (HPP) machines. The machines use water and pressure to make perishable products more shelf-stable, with applications for dairy, meat and fruit and vegetable products.

The food hub’s proponents say the equipment is crucial for making locally grown food more available. But the contracting process to build the HPP facility has been prolonged by a year of upheaval within the ADC, along with difficulty finding a contractor to do the work.

“Things became extremely chaotic,” ADC Executive Director Wendy Gady said. “It was just the timing.”

Unexpected Delays

Gady was hired late last year after a protracted recruitment process, following the unexpected death of her predecessor, James Nakatani, a shuffling of board members and the replacement of the ADC’s board chair. 

There was also a lack of bidders for the contract to build the facility. The ADC board approved the project in May 2022 and received one bid about seven months later. Because it was considered a sole-source contract, the ADC had to prove the process was above-board and negotiate costs with the contractor, Gady said.

Just after the negotiation process was about to start, in early 2023, Nakatani died, sending the ADC into months of internal upheavals.

By the time the agency returned to the negotiation process – about a year later – the previous successful bidder was no longer interested.  

The ADC now anticipates it will sign on with a contractor by Dec. 2. There are two new bidders for the $5.5 million project, Gady said.

The machines are intended to be leased on a timed basis to businesses that would typically be unable to afford to buy one outright. Commercial machines cost in the range of $600,000-$4 million. 

Sen. Donovan Dela Cruz has previously said the machines will help unlock local businesses’ ability to export their products. He did not respond to a request for comment for this report.

“I think it could have a positive impact but I think it depends on the utilization,” said Rep. Amy Perruso.

But the Whitmore Village and Wahaiwa representative said she is “less worried about high-value export development” and more worried about increasing the amount of local food for local consumption, so she is lukewarm on the entire project.

The ADC’s machines will not be the first of their kind in Hawaii, though they will likely be the biggest. The newly opened Wahiawa Value-Added Product Development Center has its own HPP machine. 

Run by Leeward Community College, the development center is intended to be a proving ground for new businesses that can use the machine to test products for potential wider-scale production in the future using the ADC’s machines.

“There’s a lot of curiosity” about the machine and its capabilities but there’s also a lot to learn, center manager Chris Bailey says.

DOE’s Centralized Kitchen

The HPP facility will sit just north of land slated for the DOE’s construction of a $28 million, 17,500-square-foot centralized kitchen. The DOE has indicated its intent to award the contract to Hensel Phelps Construction Co. 

Negotiations are still underway, DOE spokesperson Nanea Ching said in an email. 

It will contain equipment for cold and dry storage, food and meal preparation, a loading dock, utilities and office space, among other things. 

The centralized kitchen is intended to help fix flaws in the DOE food system and supply chain, which have long relied on obsolete food-ordering processes, outdated data collection and restrictive local food purchasing processes. Fewer students have been using the DOE’s meal program.

The kitchen has also been identified as a key tool for the DOE to increase its local food spending to 30% of its total food bill by 2030. 

Meanwhile, the agency has backslid on its mandated drive to increase local food spending to an interim level of 10% of its budget by 2025. 

In its 2024 report to the Legislature, which it submitted in last month – nine months late – the DOE said it spent 6.14% of its budget on local beef, produce and poi. That totals up to almost $4 million.

Officials pinned their hopes on the centralized model despite substantial pushback from the community. The kitchen will distribute up to 20,000 meals daily, all prepared in the Whitmore Village kitchen. 

Lawmakers and state officials have called it the “Zippy’s model,” in which cooking and packaging happens in a central location and the food is heated at the schools. 

The Whitmore Village community has raised concerns about the project’s effect on traffic, among other things, as they anticipate heavy congestion at the intersection of Kamehameha Highway and Whitmore Avenue.

Perruso said that as food is transported in and out of the area, facility-related traffic will choke the area’s key roadways.

The DOE is aiming to complete the facility by early 2027 to cater to students in the Leilehua-Mililani-Waialua complex area by the start of the 2027-28 school year, Ching 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.