Oahu’s only flour mill fading away

Hawaiian Flour Mills, a landmark of multihued 160-foot grain silos and corrugated steel buildings off Nimitz Highway for more than half a century, is slowly being dismantled to make way for a new era of commerce on Honolulu’s waterfront.

In business from the mid-1960s to late 2014, the mill churned out 450,000 pounds of flour a day six days a week in its heyday, according to its former operator.

Changing times and a lease disagreement between the mill operator and the state, which owns the land and buildings, spelled an end to the last flour mill in Hawaii.

“The baking industry has changed over 50 years in Hawaii,” said Chris Labbe, whose family started and ran the mill from the beginning. “All the imports that came in from the mainland of even frozen bread or milled flour … kind of replaced the (Oahu) mill’s flour over time. So that’s why the capacity went from let’s say six days a week when it was first started, to 2-1/2 to three days a week when we shut it down.”

Labbe, vice president of business development and board director for G&L Holdings Inc., added that “it’s a sad story, really, because that mill employed locals and it was in business for so long. And it was still a profitable mill regardless of the baking industry’s decline in Hawaii.”

Kerr Grain Corp. started the mill and named it Hawaiian Flour Mills, he said.

The now-unused processing plant was and still is a Rube Goldberg-like maze of conveyors and pipes and sorters on an industrial scale — that’s slowly going away.

An 84-foot-tall corrugated steel- covered overhead conveyor tower and warehouse recently were demolished to make way for a Toell USA water bottling plant.

The state expected a green seven-story flour processing building to be demolished, but pier logistics prevented it. Instead, the successor to Hawaiian Flour Mills, Grain Craft Inc., will soon commence work to clear out mill machinery and abate asbestos so the building can be repurposed, state officials said.

The 20 big grain silos themselves could come tumbling down in the future. The state wanted Grain Craft to eventually demolish the silos as part of a failed lease renegotiation at the Pier 23 site.

“The state had wanted us to offload wheat from a pier much farther away from our plant, and to tear down the grain silos if we left. We felt we just didn’t want to take the responsibility for the silos,” Alan Koenig, chief supply chain officer for Grain Craft, told Hawaii Business Magazine in 2014.

A settlement with Grain Craft over its move-out resulted in an agreement by the company to remove the processing building machinery and eliminate the hazard of asbestos floor tiles and mastic, according to the state.

Puni Chee, the state Department of Transportation’s project manager for harbors modernization, said demolishing the silos will depend on the results of the recent launch of a 2050 Honolulu Master Plan project.

“With lands around the harbor for cargo use becoming limited, redevelopment or re-purposing of the Piers 18 through 23 areas could potentially create new opportunities and greater efficiencies that support maritime operations in the Port of Honolulu,” Chee said in an email.

That master plan is expected to be completed in early 2020.

In 2004 a large crack and bulge were discovered in one of the concrete silos that at that time held 1,250 tons of wheat, resulting in the temporary evacuation of adjacent businesses.

Chee said the silos are structurally sound, and alternative uses were pursued such as the storage of cement or bio-diesel, but concerns over the strength of the piers to support the weight limited the potential use.

Meanwhile the old flour mill remains an eye-catching fixture along busy Nimitz Highway, a conglomeration of pastel-painted silos and corrugated steel.

Labbe said the distinctive multicolor appearance is not by design, but rather a result of repainting, fading and repainting.

The former mill manager told him that “most of that just occurred over time from when we did minor repairs on the silos,” Labbe said. “We were painting it — just pick a color, basically. … Originally, we were kind of a brown and orange,” and the resulting colors were “the closest they could pick.”

Atop one end of the silos is a big corrugated steel “henhouse” with belts that moved grain between silos, he said.

The mill processed Canadian spring wheat brought in about four times a year on ships that would leave from Canada, arriving with about 250,000 bushels per shipment.

“In its heyday we had a full bake lab in there” and probably 15 to 20 employees at what was always a highly automated mill, Labbe said.

Rodney Lee worked at the flour mill from 1979 to 1984 as an evening shift computer operator.

“Great memories from the warehouse guys having their Friday pau hana parties in the back of the warehouse to quiet evenings all by myself in a huge warehouse when I was the only one working the night shift. Getting out of there at midnight was pretty creepy,” Lee wrote on his blog, Midlife Crisis Hawaii.

Chee said the state became the owner of the grain silos when the harbor lands they are on were purchased over 50 years ago.

McCabe, Hamilton &Renny Co. stevedores; Young Brothers as well as Foss Maritime tugs; and DHX Dependable Hawaiian Express are among neighboring companies.

Planned tenant Toell, which has a water bottling facility in Aiea, had to remove some leftover flour and a tank of molasses in addition to the old structure, said representative Ikuyo Kato.

“Inside was a bunch of stuff. … Nobody knew,” she said.