An organic foods retailer on Kauai has filed bankruptcy and claims it has virtually no assets to pay a former landlord. But the business with more than $1 million in annual sales is still operating, after selling itself to a slightly different mix of owners and relocating its store.

Healthy Hut Inc. filed for Chapter 7 liquidation last week and reported assets of $161 in a bank account and $58,000 in debt owed to a landlord for the company’s former store in Kilauea.

But the "new" owners of the Healthy Hut Market & Cafe store about a mile away from the old store claim they aren’t responsible for the debt of the old company, which did business as Healthy Hut Natural Foods.

The bankruptcy filing states that the owners of Healthy Hut Inc., Monique Dehne and Joseph Fiorilli, sold the company’s assets — including its website, inventory and refrigeration equipment — to another company, Healthy Foods LLC, for about $20,000 in November.

The members of Healthy Foods are Dehne, Fiorilli and Scott Nemeroff, according to the state Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs.

Nemeroff was the treasurer, a director and paid adviser — but not an owner — of Healthy Hut Inc., according to the bankruptcy filing.

"It’s a different store, a different company," Nemeroff said.

Healthy Hut Inc. reported annual sales of $1.6 million in each of the last two years. The bankruptcy filing also said the business recorded a net loss of $36,905 in 2011 and $78,714 last year.

Dehne started Healthy Hut in 2004 in a 200-square-foot space in Kilauea and expanded two years later with a 500-square-foot store after partnering with Fiorilli, a Culinary Institute of America graduate, and Nemeroff, a retired attorney, according to a 2006 story in The Garden Island newspaper.

Last July before Healthy Hut’s asset sale, Nemeroff said in an interview with MidWeek Kauai that he, Dehne and Fiorilli intended to open a new store that would better serve the community with a bigger and more convenient location.

The old store in the Historic Plantation Center closed Nov. 9, which also was the day the asset sale closed. The new store opened Nov. 17.

But the landlord of the old store, Historic Plantation LLC, sued Healthy Hut Inc., Healthy Foods and its owners in March over rent obligations on the old store space under a lease running through the end of next year.

Gary Grimmer, an attorney representing the landlord, said Healthy Hut’s owners improperly dissolved the company after a failed effort to negotiate an end to the old store’s lease signed by Nemeroff.

"That’s not how it works," he said. "You don’t get to stiff creditors and take care of shareholders."

The lawsuit alleges that Healthy Hut chose to pay off some creditors but not others, namely the landlord, and that the old company and new company are owned or controlled by the same people.

"Recognition of Healthy Hut Inc. and Healthy Foods LLC as separate entities would perpetuate a fraud upon and defeat the rightful claim of (Historic Plantation) for unpaid rent and other amounts due under the lease," the suit said.

Grimmer said the landlord intends to pursue its lease debt in U.S. Bankruptcy Court.